The average college student produces 640 pounds of solid waste each year; this was one of the facts presented at a forum on Monday by students in the political science department at Cal State Long Beach.
The ecofeminism and sustainability workshop, which lasted from 12-1 p.m., was a part of “Respect Week” on campus.
The “Respect Mother Earth” event was conducted by students in the “Women in Political Theory” class to inform other students on the concept of ecofeminism and the importance of being aware of the daily human impact on the environment.
“We decided to put the event on today to correlate ecofeminism and sustainability because [how we respect] Mother Earth has a lot to do with how we respect women in general,” said junior fashion design major Gabrielle Da Silva.
The workshop took place in the University Student Union and was held in collaboration with the Women’s and Gender Equity Center and the Sustainability Department.
Attendees were offered pizza, small capsules containing reusable utensils and pins that read “I Respect Mother Earth!”
They were given the opportunity to write suggestions on how to make the campus more environmentally friendly.
Students were also encouraged to sign a pledge to “practice proper waste disposal by using the method of segregating,” a process which involves separating waste into three groups: trash, compost and recyclables.
CSULB currently has several black, grey and blue bins spread throughout the campus to accommodate those three groups.
“As a sociology major, you don’t really focus much on environmentalism,” said campus junior Glendale Deasis, who attended the forum in order to learn more on the subject of sustainability.
“The [CSU] Long Beach recycling program is really useful … The different [trash and recycling] bins make you really think about where you’re throwing everything and make you think about reusing some things,” she said.
The forum was organized by a small group of students as part of the service learning requirement for their class.
“We were able to choose where we wanted to do our service hours, and we jumped at this opportunity,” said senior political science major Stephanie Trujillo.
“We mainly saw Respect Week as a way to talk about how to respect women, and then we started doing research on the concept of ecofeminism. We got involved with the Sustainability Department because we wanted to tie in respect and recycling, and they were a lot of help,” Trujillo said.
Pam Rayburn, coordinator for the WGEC, said the students come up with ideas for events they really want to do before getting in touch with the different departments.
“We’ve done this type of collaboration before in the fall … We’re really trying to take that classroom knowledge and put it into practice, and so the students came up with this workshop,” she said.
