Organization provides shirts, encourages green initiatives
Sustainable Carolina kicked off Sustainability Week Monday with a T-shirt tie-dye event featuring '60s music and free brownies behind the Russell House.
"We were providing T-shirts that had a Sustainable Carolina logo, and all students needed to do to get one was swipe their CarolinaCard, just so we could assess who was coming and numbers and everything," said Meggie Patton, a graduate assistant with Sustainable Carolina. "And then we provided all the tie-dye stuff, so we had T-shirts already soaking and all the colors and everything. And we had collected plastic bags from grocery stores for a while so that we could reuse them for people to take their wet shirts home in. And we had '60s music and brownies out because it kind of went with our theme to make it real chill and hippie and fun, just to get some attention for Sustainability Week."
Sustainable Carolina is made up of graduate assistants and undergraduate interns who are divided into teams that focus on things such as recycling, gardening and environmental action, among others.
The tie-dye event was scheduled to run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. but the almost 200 T-shirts were gone by noon, cutting the event short.
"And it's great for us to get our message out because while they're tie-dyeing we talk about what else is going on and we say who our group is and why we're even doing this," Patton said. "I think that we got a lot of positive attention from it."
Patton attributes the increased attention to the First-Year Reading Experience, which was "No Impact Man" by Colin Beavan. "No Impact Man" is the story of Beavan, his wife and his young daughter, who for one year, attempted to make zero impact on the environment while living in the middle of Manhattan.
"So Sustainability Week in general is promoting the first-year reading theme," Patton said. "Sustainable Carolina works to actively try to create a campus up to its peer institutions in terms of sustainability and beyond that. And Carolina has done some amazing stuff. We're one of the leaders in green initiatives. And just the fact that we're doing 'No Impact Man' as a campuswide initiative is really exciting. And we're just promoting that."
Some other events of the week include a sustainable jobs presentation on Tuesday from 4 to 5 p.m. in West (Green) Quad and a Sustainability Fair on Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the Russell House Patio that will feature student organizations to spread awareness of opportunities for students in the environmental movement.