In celebrating Earth Day, students participated in eco-friendly events such as recycling, biking and measuring their waste.

Global Warming. Renewable resources. These are items that the media bombards us with every day revolving around the environment. Earth Day is that one day a year that we stop and think about the environment and how we can make this planet that we live on a better place for us and our future children.

Sodexo chose to celebrate Earth Day in its cafeteria by providing an environmentally-friendly dinner. The tables were decorated with bouquets of flowers in tin cans. Paper plates and plastic forks replaced Sodexo’s regular colorful tableware so that water could be conserved without having to wash dishes that night. The buffet line ranged from hot dogs and veggie burgers to locally-grown organic vegetables. TVs displayed the campus news and lights illuminated the room. Students poured colored sand into used plastic bottles and kept the bottles as mementos from the Sodexo Earth Day event. Instead of taking unused food and plates to the conveyor belt where the food would be thrown into the trash, Sodexo set up a system of different receptacles to encourage recycling: one bin for food scraps and the other for plastic and paper products.

Sodexo recycled all the paper and plastic products that were used during the event.

“I think (what Sodexo did) is good, but it needs to be more habitual,” sophomore Carrie Burks said.

The Board of Regents turned down the Green Fee initiative that would have provided campus recycling earlier this month.

“There needs to be more recycling options on campus,” sophomore Elizabeth Dalman said.

“It surprises me that it’s up to the dorms to recycle while (I think that) a service should be provided,” Burks said.

Unfortunately, due to the windy weather, Sodexo had to move the event from its intended venue of the courtyard in between Foundation and Parkhurst halls to its cafeteria on campus.

Other Sodexo cafeterias across the country participated in an “Earth Day Will Weigh Waste to Raise Awareness of Impact” event. Students weighed their food before it was thrown away to show the students how much they wasted. According to Monica Zimmer of Sodexo, 25 percent of prepared food is wasted. In addition, the US spends $1 billion a year to dispose of food waste.

The District Marketing Manager of the Wooten District, Katy Kash, explains why GCSU’s Sodexo isn’t following suit with the other Sodexhos.

“(Sodexo is) just doing something different,” Kash said. “(Sodexo) wanted (its) event to be as sustainable as possible. (Sodexo wanted to provide) a fun, laid-back event to celebrate the Earth.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on May 1 2009. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry