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Campus organizations brought posters, bicycles and live bees to the Earth Day Festival in the Stamp Student Union Monday.

Over 20 groups attended the event, from the beekeeping club, which brought a glass-fronted beehive exhibit, to the Department of Transportation Services, with a stationary bike that blends smoothies. The festival also featured live music from Milkbath, The Radiographers, and The Produce Section.

Environmental justice, the theme of the event, addresses the disproportionate impact of environmental issues on minority and low-income communities.

This was UMD’s 49th Earth Day festival, according to Andrew Muir, communications manager at the university’s Office of Sustainability. Muir emphasized the importance of bringing different sustainability groups on campus together.

“[Earth Day Festival] really shows the students, staff and faculty that are all involved in sustainability that there’s a lot of like-minded people on this campus that are really trying to accomplish a lot of the same goals, they’re just kinda going about it in different ways,” Muir  said.

Muir said future collaboration may be fostered by the SCoop, or sustainability cooperative, an organization founded last semester to create opportunities for groups to work together on sustainability initiatives.

Max Skoglund, a junior environmental science and policy major, tabled for SCoop at the festival. Skoglund said the cooperative represents 20 organizations and has “a lot of potential for being a big factor on campus.”

The SGA’s Sustainability Committee organized the event. Viny Correa, a sophomore communications major and a member of the committee, said the SGA wanted to foster thinking around issues of sustainability and environmental justice.

“Though it’s preached a lot on campus we feel like it’s not really followed through as much as we’d hope,” Correa said. “We just want to get students together [and] make them realize that it’s fun to be sustainable.”

Correa said that although waste created by the event was always a concern, most of the giveaway items, which included stickers, pamphlets, reusable straws and water bottles, were intended to combat waste.

“We kind of left it a little bit up to each organization in terms of what they’re going to do at the event, so they’re going to be pretty much in charge of their waste,” Correa said.

Despite the event’s goal of raising awareness, sophomore mathematics and computer science major Andrew Frock said he didn’t learn anything new from the event and saw it as teaching “base-level conservation stuff.”

Betel Areda, a senior public health science major, tabled for ROOTS Africa, a group partnered with a college in Liberia to bring young entrepreneurs into agriculture. Areda said she enjoyed all the displays, especially the beekeeping club. But she also said she didn’t learn “anything special” about sustainability from the event.

During the event, the Office of Sustainability announced the winners of its sustainability fund grants. Dining Services received $150,000 to reduce plastic waste in the cafes and provide reusable bags for students living on campus, while 16 other groups received smaller grants for various projects.