Opinion > April 24, 2008

By Andrew Britt | Guest columnist

Our group, the Sustainability Week Committee, began the project to have a “Sustainability Week” with three main goals.

We intended to spark a debate within the university community about the idea of sustainability, touching on both sustainable and non-sustainable practices on campus. We aimed to represent the student population within that debate, engaging the university in a conversation about what sustainability means and how it relates to people’s daily lives. Finally, we hoped to make some small changes and illuminate changes already being made that reveal our university’s new commitment to sustainability.

We had about five main initiatives for this week. We initiated the replacement of Styrofoam in the Pit. We sold 32-oz. water bottles that cut down on bottled water consumption. Polling stations were set up in the Pit, in addition to a display that showed simple changes students can make to reduce their ecological footprint. We showed changes being made within university facilities and ARAMARK, and, finally, we promoted recycling by providing customizable recycling bins.

Perhaps our main goal was to replace Styrofoam to-go containers in the Pit, which were being used anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 times every week.

Replacing this wasteful product with a biodegradable alternative is a great success for this group, though we consider it only a step forward. Sustainable living demands that we must come up with new solutions that produce little to no waste, instead of even biodegradable containers which will still take years to decompose. Eckerd College, for instance, has initiated a program where students rent hard plastic to-go containers that can be used time and time again.

Eckerd’s program creates no waste, other than the water needed to clean the container after each use. There are ways to make all our processes more sustainable, though they demand commitment to innovation and the willingness to change.

While we are happy that some changes have been made in our campus, we recognize that this project is only a beginning. We are the first to admit that our effect on the sustainability of the university has not been monumental; perhaps it has been little more than noteworthy. But we conceived this week as a beginning.

Steps are being made within the administration, the student population and the dining facilities. We must devote ourselves on all levels of this institution — academics, social life, administration, athletics and more — to analyze how we consume and what byproducts that consumption creates for our university and society as a whole. Our goal for this week is to illuminate these changes, while emphasizing that this is only a beginning to what can and hopefully will be a more sustainable university.

Sustainability is defined by some as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. We hope that this week has sparked students, faculty and staff to evaluate their own lives as they relate to this definition and indeed the concept of sustainability as a whole.

Andrew Britt is a junior English major from Winston-Salem.