Green Group works to clean up MCC
Brianna Martinez
The green group at MCC is entirely devoted to keeping MCC’s campus clean and environment friendly. The group discusses way to help the campus become more eco-friendly and has already started establishing different ways to do it.
One of their main events that goes on during the school year is the dumpster dive where students, employees, and the faculty of MCC dig out the recyclable garbage from the dumpster and properly recycle it.
The green groups main coordinator, Steve Bass, faculty member in Cultural Sciences, said this year’s dumpster dive went extremely well.
“We had so many volunteers, we were done before we knew it.”
He also said that there were 671 coffee cups disposed in the dumpster and that half of them were from Starbucks.
The group would like to try and get students and employees to start using reusable coffee mugs and even polycarbonate water bottles.
They are reusable water bottles and also eco-friendly. They can be purchased at certain health food stores.
They are also hoping to install water vending machines around campus to refill water bottles.
The vending machine would contain about a liter of water and would cost a small amount of money to fill up the water bottle. Also, school schedules and the MCC class catalogs are not printed on recycled paper, but they said that it will soon be hopefully by next year.
The food on campus is also another issue they are hoping to improve. Healthier foods and especially the packaging it comes in. The packaging should all be recyclable and same with the plastic silverware.
The campus use to distribute actual silverware but then that wasted a lot of water, which turned into the problem of too much water consumption.
One way to lessen this problem is for employees to just bring their own silverware.
The group definitely wants to help with the food issues and the nutrition of it and the cost but they said the food contract our campus has does not end until 2010, but they are going to try and do an amendment to alter the contract.
The group is also taking a tour of North Gateway Recycling Center Feb.22 from 11:30 PM- 3 PM. All are welcome and for more information contact Steve Bass in the Cultural Sciences department.
