Members of St. Lawrence’s Environmental Action Organization (EAO) braved the rain and donned rubber gloves Tuesday, sorting and separating trash for the first annual Trash on the Lawn Day.
Longtime EAO member Mia Sloan ’12 said, “We took all of Monday’s trash from the student center and sorted, weighed, and separated it into recyclables and compost.”
The event took place in a fenced-in area on the old Java quad. EAO members and other student volunteers went through the collected trash, moving bottles, cans, and waste to their respectively labeled areas around the fence.
Louise Gava, St. Lawrence’s coordinator of sustainability projects, said that generally, students know that individuals in the University community could be doing more to help St. Lawrence recycle. “To quantify how much could be done and the financial and environmental considerations of such a change, students chose a visible location to sort the daily trash collected from the common spaces of the Student Center,” she said.
Gava continued to explain that the goal of the event was to raise awareness about what St. Lawrence can do to increase awareness of sustainability. “I have great respect for those who will stand in the drizzle and sort trash from recyclable and compostable materials,” Gava said, “and I hope these students’ peers and SLU employees understood the reasons for their actions and the role they too can play in creating a more sustainable University.”
