The Suffolk University Sustainability Committee has completed preparations for next week’s Earth Day celebrations in and around campus.
These events include a green campus tour, a Suffolk farmers market, an environmental film screening, an earth day fair and a bike raffle, all of which have been designed to continue the committee’s mission to empower, educate and enable students to be sustainable citizens.
“We have been meeting about Earth Week once a week for two months to make sure it was all coming together,” said Director of Facilities and administrator of the Sustainability Committee, Ashley Lindsey. “We wanted people to feel like they are taking something away from these events, something they can use in their own lives.”
The five day series of programs has been completed in partnership with the Environmental Club, Sodexo and the Center Urban Ecology and Sustainability (CUES).
“On our first day, we are going to have a tour with our Director of Construction [Andre Vega], to show students the places on campus that were designed to be sustainable,” said Lindsey.
Nearly half of Suffolk’s square footage has been LEED certified, marking it as sustainable in its heating, water usage, building materials and more.
The Suffolk Journal reported last month that the Sustainability Committee has shifted focus onto creating education programs to encourage knowledge on how to recycle in the Suffolk community, something that has been an area of interest for Lindsey.
“Going forward we are trying to teach people the information they need to live more sustainably,” she said. “We want to pump this information into them so that when a student comes here, they already know that our buildings do recycle because they were already told about it.”
Lindsey explained that programs like this need to be tested for efficacy before they can be implemented and that Earth Week will be used to gauge the student response to those kinds of programs.
“With the success from these events, we will be able to see how they will all be able to be repeated on their own, like with the farmers market, it would be easy to run that on an ongoing basis, but we don’t yet know how successful these types of events will be,” said Lindsey. “[Earth Week] will be a really powerful tool in deciding where to go next.”
