By Fiona Roy
The Student Government Association’s sustainability committee held its first clean-up event on Feb. 26 to collect litter throughout the downtown College Park area.
The crew of SGA members and student volunteers walked through the Old Town and Leonardtown areas picking up trash scattered along the streets and sidewalks.
Seven volunteers turned out for the first event, but the SGA is hopeful for a larger group for future clean-ups, Julia Kallaur, a sophomore criminology and criminal justice major and SGA director of the diversity, equity and inclusion committee, said.
Clean-up events are expected to occur at least once a month in different locations around the College Park area. The idea behind these clean-up events is to minimize the trash college students leave all over the city, like cans, bottles, wrappers and plastic cups, and to give back to the community, Kallaur said.
“We just want to help the people on the council kind of get exposed to what the campus community’s impacts our surrounding environment on a direct level,” Alana Ginsburg, a junior environmental science and policy major and the SGA director of the sustainability committee, said.
Anyone is welcome to join the sustainability committee if they are inspired to work and help clean the environment in some way or another, sophomore neuroscience major and SGA representative for Leonardtown, Raquel Chaupiz, said.
“We’re hoping to have more people from a lot of cultural organizations, volunteer organizations across campus who understand kind of what the meaning of environmental justice is and/or have experience with its impacts,” Ginsburg said. “[Those] who can come together and talk about how we can address it on a campus level.”
The clean-up lasted three hours and concluded at the Old Leonardtown playground where the collected litter was left to be picked up by the Department of Public Works for the city of College Park.
The sustainability committee is organizing future events. Next month’s focus is along Route 1 near off-campus apartment complexes like the University View or Tempo, Kallaur said. The committee is working on a panel discussion to provide more education on environmental justice for people on campus who may or may not be members of an organization or collaborative group, Ginsburg said.
The committee will also host Earthfest, another educational event, in April to help to promote new ways to understand and achieve sustainable living within a community, Chaupiz said.
Other committee goals for a sustainable future in College Park include the switch from diesel-fueled buses to electricity-run buses, said Chaupiz.
However, the switch from liquid fuel to electrical is rather costly.
“Unfortunately, electrical buses cost is about double what the standard bus that runs on diesel is, and we don’t have the funds for them,” Chaupiz said. “We’ve been trying to look a lot for grant money and whatnot … it’s really frustrating … they haven’t allotted enough time and money for that.”
Their efforts remain a work in progress, but the committee remains confident in its mission to make College Park a more environmentally sustainable community.
Featured photo: Members of the clean-up crew categorized the litter into piles by trash items, glass, recyclable materials and metal. (Stories Beneath the Shell/Fiona Roy)