Loyola Honors Sustainability Efforts Through Water Week Celebration

Loyola celebrated what they call “Water Week” from March 20 to March 25 in an effort to encourage on campus sustainability within the student body and go along with Loyola’s green efforts as a university. 

Water Week is part of a larger initiative on campus, which includes a week for food, energy, transportation, waste and earth, which are held intermittently throughout the school year, according to the website.

The website listed 10 events taking place throughout the week, including some which involved a collaboration between various clubs and departments within the university.

The School of Environmental Science (SES), Office of Sustainability, School of Communication (SOC), Student Environmental Alliance (SEA), Restoration Club, and Loyola Dining Services were amongst the organizations and programs involved in the annual awareness week. 

The university sees water as one of the most important and unifying issues facing the next generation, according to the website.

In each of the dining halls, a “Wipe Out Waste Challenge” was held, encouraging students to become more aware of the food waste they create by having them scrape the leftover food on their plate into a bin before placing their dishes onto the dish racks, according to Jordan Davis, Loyola dining service’s sustainability manager. 

“Wipe Out Waste is a wonderful opportunity to identify waste trends and come up with solutions on how to decrease this waste from an operational and consumer standpoint,” Davis wrote in an email to The Phoenix.

Sidney Dulak, a sophomore environmental studies major said these “Wipe Out Waste Challenges” annoyed her because students aren’t always given the option to serve themselves, and have no control over portion sizes.

“They make us feel bad for having all of this extra food waste, but it’s not our fault, because we didn’t get to serve ourselves how much food we wanted,” Dulak said. 

The university stopped allowing students to serve themselves in the dining halls in 2021. 

All food waste in the dining halls is sent to a composting facility near Lake Calumet in Chicago, about 30 miles away from LSC, The Phoenix previously reported. 

At the facility, the waste is piled into football-field length piles which are regularly turned and kept at a high enough temperature to decompose the material. The end result is a nutrient-dense soil which can replace chemical fertilizer, The Phoenix previously reported.

Free reusable water bottles were being passed out to students in the Damen Student Center March 20 as a way to encourage students to choose sustainability over single use plastic, according to the website.

Davis also said the university is creating more access to sustainable options for bottled water, which were available in the past but revoked when Loyola changed food service providers, The Phoenix previously reported.

“We have brought to campus an environmentally conscious locally owned bottled water option called Open Water – an ultra-purified, electrolyte-packed canned water in BPA-free aluminum packaging – promoting more ocean, less plastic,” Davis wrote in an email to The Phoenix.

Davis said Dining Services works hard with the university to create a sustainable campus environment. 

“Loyola Dining is proud to work closely with the Office of Sustainability to continuously develop and implement sustainable solutions across all campus dining,” Davis wrote.”Loyola Dining is passionate about reducing our environmental impact and work on innovative ways to do this daily.”

In honor of Water Week, a cinema series was hosted in Damen’s Cinema March 23. The film, “Crip Camp,” analyzes the importance of the connection between environmental sustainability and disability rights, according to Urooj Raja, an assistant professor of advocacy and social change, who led a discussion following the screening. 

The screening of this film was a collaboration between the SOC and the SES, according to Raja.

Raja said she hopes to use this screening as a way to remind students of Loyola’s mission of becoming connected with their immediate campus community.

“I really focus on the human factor of environmental problems, and I think having screenings like this really allows students to break away from the classroom space which can sometimes be constricting,” Raja said.

Aaron Durnbaugh, director of The Office of Sustainability, said Water Week is a celebration the university holds every year.

“WaterWeek happens in midMarch to coincide with World Water Day (March 22^nd),” Durnbaugh wrote in an email to The Phoenix. “The Office of Sustainability partners with organizations across Loyola and our main campuses to address water quality, insecurity and innovation.”

A watercolor event was hosted by the SEA March 23 in celebration of Water Week, where students were invited to paint their own tote bag for free. 

Brian Chiu, a junior environmental studies major who serves as one of the co-presidents of the club, said he was involved in the planning of the event. Chiu said events such as these are important because they highlight a different aspect of environmentalism, and bring new people to awareness on the subject.

There are about 30 students involved with SEA, and approximately 25 students attended the water color event, according to Chiu. Among them was Sherelyn Venuso, a junior environmental science major, along with Dulak.

Venuso said she became aware of the event because of an email sent to her by the university, while Dulak said she learned of the event through her involvement in the SEA and through posters which were hung in SES.

Outside of Water Week, the SEA remains involved in environmental sustainability on campus through hosting speaker events and conducting research, according to Chiu.

Dulak said she thinks these initiatives are important because of everything she has learned in her environmental science classes, which point towards deteriorating environmental conditions being caused by human activity.

“Our planet is dying,” Dulak said. “We should probably do something to change that, and sustainability is one of the ways we can do that.”

The earth’s temperature has gone up by an average of 0.14 ℉ every decade since 1880, for a total of 2 ℉ in total, with the rate of warming doubling since 1981 according to the Climate.gov website. 

Venuso said she thinks sustainability is important not only on campus but on a larger world scale because it affects everything in the world.

A meeting was held in the Granada Center, along with an option to join over Zoom March 24, which discussed the importance of urban planning, according to the website.

Loyola’s Restoration Club hosted a work day at the university’s Retreat and Ecology Campus on March 25, and was open to all students who RSVP’d online ahead of time, according to the website.

The Restoration Club did not respond to The Phoenix’s requests for comment.

Featured image by Holden Green | The Phoenix