When Emma Edwards saw the Syracuse University Sustainability Division table at orientation day, she was eager to join.

‘I ran over and I was like, ‘Sign me up right now!” she said.

But she was turned down because the Sustainability Division is a department restricted to SU faculty.

This didn’t stop her. Instead, Edwards, a freshman policy studies major, got the idea of starting a sustainability student group. The Sustainability Division was fully supportive, she said.

‘They work for the university trying to promote sustainability, and they were interested in getting students involved, but they weren’t really sure how,’ Edwards said. ‘So I told them that I would do the dirty work for them and so, here I am.’

With the support of Brooke Wears, senior project analyst with SU’s Energy Systems and Sustainability Management, Edwards held the first general interest meeting to begin forming the club on Thursday.

Initially, Edwards felt she was alone in her concern for the environment.

But she isn’t. Fourteen students from different majors, such as geography, international relations and civil engineering, attended the meeting. The students showed their concern about many issues on campus like food waste, recycling, consumption and waste of plastic water bottles. The latter got a lot of attention from the attendees.

Nicole Perman, a junior geography major, is currently looking into the plastic water bottle issue at different universities for her senior capstone. She said many universities like Harvard, Stanford and Cornell have prohibited the use of plastic water bottles almost completely. One of the reasons for the change was the installation of water refill stations on campus, she said.

These are machines that look like the ones found in any fast-food restaurant where customers can fill up their own cups of soda. Perman said that although these are very expensive, the price to get water bottles is comparable to what the university pays Pepsi.

From this, the students got the idea of proposing the installation of one water refill station to test out the students’ reaction and motivate the use of reusable water bottles.

‘If we could actually ban water bottles on campus, that would be huge,’ Wears, senior project analyst with SU’s Energy Systems and Sustainability Management, said at the meeting.

Students also came up with the idea to put up signs at residence halls and dining halls promoting recycling.

Zach Goldberg, a freshman international relations major, proposed spreading the word about the recycling signs available for download at the Sustainability Division website.

‘You can print them out personally, take your two pieces of paper and just put them right (on) your recycling bins,’ he said. ‘It’s just telling you right in front of you: ‘These specific things can be recycled, these things can’t.”

Ideas flowed among the students for almost an hour. Even though the club is not registered with the university yet, the students agreed to meet once a month and move forward with the club.

Until then, Wears will help the group set up its own email list to share more ideas about what can be done on campus and what members find in their research about the topics discussed.

vymagan@syr.edu

Published on October 30, 2011 at 12:00 pm