Trinity’s Green Campus combats wasteful routines

NATY BUSH ’19

STAFF WRITER

The buffet-style meals served at Mather create a lot of waste. This isn’t news to any of us. We fill our plates with slightly more, or a lot more, food than we can manage to finish, so the rest of the food gets tossed out.

This food is not all wasted, however. Trinity’s Green Campus club began a composting program three years ago. The group picks up the food waste once a week and dumps it in a designated composting area a few minutes down the road from campus. Coordination difficulties caused the program to stop for two years, but last spring, the composting trips were rebooted. One trip a week is not enough to compost all of the excess food, but it was a start.

This year, Green Campus is working toward taking two trips a week.

Denzel Munroe ’18, President of Green Campus, has been pushing to make the student body more aware of the fact that the food gets composted so that there will be more interest in increasing the number of trips.

“The way it’s always been set up was as a once-a-week trip,” Munroe explained. “Having more volunteers would be a huge help in expanding our program.”

The club is also in the process of working with other food venues on campus to compost their food waste as well.

In addition to the increased composting, Green Campus will be starting a new environmentally-friendly project soon, hopefully to be in full swing by the spring. Joseph Orosco ’19 is leading the project to create a hydroponic garden on campus to provide a year-round garden for students.

“The garden will first be constructed in the basement of Trinfo Café to serve as a demo site,” Orosco described. “The function for the garden is to be able to plant fruits, vegetables, and flowers, and to grow them without soil, to only use sunlight and water containing necessary vitamins and minerals, or to use artificial lighting that can replace sunlight. It will be up to us to decide what to do with the food grown. Some ideas include making meals out of it, selling it, or giving it to those in need.”

This may be the first time that Trinity has been constructing a hydroponic garden, and since it is still in the process of starting up, it may be difficult for Green Campus to gather enough support from the student body to get the garden to become fully functional.

“For those who aren’t very outdoorsy, this is the perfect activity, since you really don’t have to get your hands dirty, and you will not have to deal with insects,” Orosco was pleased to say.

On a final note, since it is often difficult to have the entire student body aware of what is going on within Trinity’s campus, Munroe would like the students to know of one other main activity in which Green Campus takes part.

“Periodically, we do off-campus community service events at nearby parks and rivers,” Munroe stated. All students are welcome to help out with park clean-ups whenever they take place, as well as with any other Green Campus events.