Earth Day draws campus partners together for sustainability events

UChicago News

The University of Chicago will commemorate Earth Day with a series of events designed to inform and engage the campus community on ongoing research, student-driven initiatives and sustainable projects.The April 22 events will be sponsored by 16 campus partners, including the Office of the Provost, the Office of Sustainability and the Program on Global Environment. Among the highlights are an Earth Fest showcasing sustainability programs and a discussion featuring alumnus and former White House chef Sam Kass.

A new event this year will be the daylong Zero-Waste Athletics Event, set to take place during the University Athletic Association’s Outdoor Track and Field Conference Championship Meet. Helping support the event is the Campus as a Laboratory initiative, which uses UChicago's campus as a test bed to explore projects that bring students, faculty and staff together to collaborate, analyze and create innovative solutions with sustainable outcomes used on campus and beyond.

“The Campus as a Lab initiative seeks to encourage and support great interdisciplinary collaborations like these,” said Melina Hale, vice provost for academic initiatives and the William Rainey Harper Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy.

The Zero-Waste Athletics Event, which is designed to use sustainable materials and practices to reduce waste sent to landfills, is the result of an Environmental Studies practicum course in which students researched ways to reduce waste generation and recover material for beneficial reuse.

“Our goal is to develop a model of how to run green events or zero-waste events on campus and identify some of the big challenges as well as the opportunities to divert more waste from landfills,” said Sabina Shaikh, senior lecturer in the College and  practicum instructor. “We’re hoping to create a template to do it and learn from our experiences at the same time.”

Maya Scheidl, a fourth-year in environmental studies, was one of the students in the practicum course and ...

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