Ana, ‘13

When I went to our regular Monday evening GreenUR meeting, I assumed it  would be just a regular meeting. And so it was, for most of the time. The regular announcements, status of projects, and plans for future were discussed, and then we got to our most important current project, Recyclemania.

Recyclemania is a big annual competition held over 6 weeks, where several schools compete against each other to see which recycles more. For the past couple of years, GreenUR has taken care of implementing it on campus. This year we have a target of placing on a national and state level a lot higher than before. After the first week, our rankings are indeed better than our rankings over the same time period last year.

To boost student participation, we usually organize waste audits in open places, where volunteers look through trash and take away the stuff that should have been recycled, and in the recycling containers to take away the stuff that shouldn’t be there.   This year however, the GreenUR executive board proposed to make a mini-waste audit of 10 minutes in the Commons after our relatively short meeting. So we put on gloves to look through the trash, or carried around Recyclemania stickers to promote it, and stepped to conquer the Commons.

 

Some of our team and the Recycle Gorilla, our main UR mascot that makes people recycle and scares away those who don’t

people from the Pier wondering what was going on 

And this is how I suddenly found myself looking through the trash at 8:30 PM. It was the first time we did an activity outside the Think-Tank (a lovely glass room near the Richmond side of the campus, where a lot of student organizations hold their regular meetings) during our standard meeting time. But it was a lot of fun!

Here is an older video of the Recycle Gorilla, that I hope you find inspiring:

This week was Environmental Awareness Week at UR. For that, GreenUR prepared a lot of events: environmental-related movie screenings in Gottwald Auditorium,  t-shirt surgery (making an old t-shirt fancy so you can keep wearing it in a new way), a presentation of local organic food in D-Hall, composting workshops, dinner at Ipanema (the greatest veggie restaurant in the world - actually it’s the only veggie restaurant I go because I’m not vegetarian, but the food is amazing even for meat-eaters (if you are vegetarian, Ipanema would be a sufficient reason to come to school in Richmond)), and tree planting. I hope I didn’t leave anything out.Today we went close to  Maymont to plant some trees. A friend and I first went to pick up the trees from someone’s yard. In there, we received a full lecture on tree planting, tree species, and local geology. Because of one round rock we found, it turns out that the area was covered by a sea a million years ago.

one of our backseat passangers…

…who wouldn’t even fit into the car!

Then we met the rest of the people and started planting our 4 trees.

It’s the first tree planting that GreenUR has done at least since I am a member, and it proved to be very efficient and quick. In a little more than one hour we were done. After seeing how fast it goes, and because the person who gave us the trees said that he could give us about 30 more trees, we decided to do it again and gather more people. We’ll see how it goes!

There is this belief in Romania that a person is not fulfilled in life until he either plants a tree, has kids, or writes a book. I assume that most high school or college students don’t really plan on having kids too soon, and 99% of them don’t write books, at least not so early. So if it takes 1 hour to plant  4 trees, I guess anybody can spare 15 minutes to become fulfilled. GreenUR is starting to give that chance to UR students!

Happy planting!