Campus Sustainability Month Recap
October was Campus Sustainability Month and UM showed up and showed out in celebration! Over the course of the month, the Office of Sustainability and other university offices hosted NINE events for Campus Sustainability Month. These events offered Ñý¼§Ö±²¥, faculty, and staff a range of opportunities to engage with sustainability topics, so let’s recap!
ASUM Transportation Bike Tune-Up Event
To start off Campus Sustainability Month, hosted a bike tune-up event on October 9th out on the Oval! During this event, ASUM Transportation and Free Cycles bike mechanics teamed up to help Ñý¼§Ö±²¥, faculty, and staff fix up their bicycles. They also did outreach to teach cyclists how to register and protect their bikes, as well as doing general transit outreach to promote sustainable transportation. Biking to campus is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint, and we were super excited that ASUM Transportation helped out our UM cyclists during Campus Sustainability Month!
Zero Waste Homecoming Game
Over the course of this fall, the Office of Sustainability's Zero-Waste Team has been diverting compost and recycling from the waste stream at the Summer Concert Series and football games in Washington-Grizzly Stadium. During the October 12th Homecoming game, our team highlighted these zero-waste efforts as part of Campus Sustainability Month! With help from Monte, we put out a on how to sort your waste inside the stadium, and our team also made and wore “Zero Waste Team” buttons during the game. Another highlight of the game was that the three water bottle-filling stations funded by the Kless Sustainability Fund were installed just in time for the game resulting in lines of people waiting to refill their water bottles! Woohoo!
Bear Aware Fair
As many of you may have gathered from the numerous UM Police Bear Alert emails over the last couple weeks, there are several bears around campus. It is important for Ñý¼§Ö±²¥, faculty, and staff to practice bear-safe behavior in order to reduce negative bear-human interactions. To highlight these practices, the Bear Aware Fair was hosted on the oval on October 15th! As part of Campus Sustainability Month, this fair provided lots of outreach for the many bear-safe resources on the UM Campus. To learn more about these resources, visit our “Being Bear Aware at UM” blog post.
Fall Clothing Swap
On October 17th, we hosted our 2nd annual Fall Clothing Swap for Campus Sustainability Month! Over the three-hour event, large groups of Ñý¼§Ö±²¥, faculty, and staff showed up to swap clothing and engage in discussions about sustainable practices. Thrifting and getting clothes second-hand are great ways to reduce overconsumption and stop fast fashion. At the end of the event, we were happy to report that we only had 5 small bags of leftover clothing to donate to Secret Seconds! Our Fall Clothing Swap is one of our favorite ways to celebrate Campus Sustainability Month.
Campus Sustainability Tours
UM is doing some BIG things around campus for sustainability! To highlight these projects for Campus Sustainability Month, our Sustainability Engagement Coordinator gave two campus sustainability tours on October 23rd and 24th. Some of the stops on the tour include the Combined Heat and Power Plant, All in the Hall bins in the Education Building, and LED lighting in the Fitness & Recreation Center. For a full write-up of our walking campus sustainability tour, visit our website here. Additionally, after attending one of the tours, Kaimin reporter, Emma White, wrote an
ASUM Transportation Transit Treats
Taking the bus, walking, biking, and carpooling are all super awesome sustainable transportation options! As part of Campus Sustainability Month, ASUM Transportation hosted a Transit Treats event on October 28th. Located at the Transit Hub, ASUM Transportation and Office of Sustainability staff handed out breakfast treats to people who commuted sustainably! They also highlighted the UDASH bus routes, as well as the bus service to the Election Center on November 5th. Transit Treat will now be a monthly occurrence on the last Monday of every month, so remember to take sustainable transportation on those days in exchange for a little treat!
Waste Demonstration Event
As mentioned above, the Zero-Waste Ambassador team has been diverting compost and recycling from the waste stream at all home football games so far this year! They have been very successful with over 3,000 lbs of compost and recycling collected at every game. In order to showcase these amounts to the wider UM community, we held a waste demonstration event on the oval on October 30th. In a large circle on the center of the oval, we placed empty compost and recycling bins totaling all of the compost and half of the recycling that we normally collect at just ONE game. Alongside this, we gave away free hot chocolate and coffee and invited attendees to go on a walking tour of graphics detailing all of our zero-waste efforts over the last year. This event helped Ñý¼§Ö±²¥ visualize the sheer amount of compost and recycling that football games produce beyond just throwing their waste in a bin. This was another great way to highlight our efforts during Campus Sustainability Month.
Campus Dining Sustainable Soup Pop-Up
On Halloween, Campus Dining did a fun pop-up to celebrate by giving away homemade squash bisque and pumpkin bars! All the ingredients for the soup and bars came from the final harvest of the Iron Griz gardens making it the perfect way to highlight Campus Sustainability Month. The warm soup and the sweet bar were the perfect treats to brighten up the dreary Halloween day! A big thanks to Campus Dining and the Iron Griz gardens!
Sustainable Halloween Costume Contest
As the last event for Campus Sustainability Month, the Office of Sustainability hosted a virtual sustainable costume contest via Instagram to help the campus community celebrate Halloween. To enter, Ñý¼§Ö±²¥, faculty, and staff simply had to submit a picture of their costume with a short explanation of why it was sustainable. Was it thrifted or borrowed? Did you make it yourself? Is it made out of recycled materials? All the submissions we gathered were wonderful, but Professor Natalie Bursztyn took home the prize with her lobster costume. She knitted the whole thing herself using yarn from vintage sweaters and used kitchen tongs to give her costume “real pincher action”! We want to say a big thank you to everyone who participated and helped us ring in the end of Campus Sustainability Month!
Go Griz!