ASU’s first Sustainable Foods Day on Tuesday kicked off Earth Week and the University’s celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, which will fall on Thursday.
Kim Pearson, a sustainability sophomore, president of ASU’s chapter of United Students for Fair Trade and student events coordinator for the Global Institute of Sustainability, coordinated the Tempe campus picnic and festival.
“The purpose is to educate about local, fair, organic and nutritious food and just encourage people to think about where their food comes from, how it’s produced, how nutritious it is and whether the people producing it are treated fairly,” Pearson said.
Several speakers talked about issues related to fair trade and sustainability on Hayden Lawn Tuesday.
Comprised mainly of students from sustainability and environmental groups, the overall turnout was low, though students stopped by throughout the fair.
“This event is unique in that we’re bringing farmers and people working on the front lines of food activism onto campus to talk directly to students,” Pearson said.
Instead of just one day, coordinators decided to spread events out over the week and focus on Earth Day, food and waste overall, she said.
“Food was coming up a lot because it just seems like something that’s really on everyone’s radar now,” Pearson said.
Students stopped by tents to eat bananas, wraps and organic peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The sandwiches were featured as part of a campaign.
“A main idea is that just by eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you can drastically lower your environmental impact,” Pearson said, adding that the sandwiches’ ingredients are not meat-based and can actually conserve water and reduce greenhouse gas.
Students were encouraged to bring their own cups and napkins to lower the amount of waste, but the fair trade group also provided compostable cups and recycled napkins.
“Afterward, we’re going to compost the cups through a local company,” she said.
Pearson’s chapter of the United Students for Fair Trade is in its second year and was originally led by Charis Elliott, who will be a justice studies graduate student in the fall.
Elliott is also the executive director of the fair trade nonprofit organization Las Otras Hermanas and the founder of the Las Otras Hermanas Fair Trade Boutique in Phoenix.
The ASU chapter will be helping Las Otras Hermanas by providing T-shirts from ASU students that women in Juarez, Mexico, can use to create new clothing and bags.
Elliott spoke at the event about the sustainability of fair trade coffee.
“Fair trade coffee can be up to $1.25 per pound, and that’s no matter what the economy’s like,” Elliott said. “Even if the stock market crashes, the farmers who participate in fair trade still get $1.25 per pound.”
There is also a 10-cent social premium that goes toward the farmers, she said.
Fair trade coffee has many benefits, including being a specialty coffee, promoting biodiversity on farms and regulating tree height — or shade-grown trees, which can protect the trees, coffee and other organisms.
Other events throughout the day included a farmers’ market and a film screening of “King Corn,” a feature documentary about modern agriculture in the U.S.
The West and Polytechnic campuses had their own Earth Day celebrations.
Cathy Reyes, a communication and special events management senior, helped coordinate the events as an intern in the Student Engagement Office at the West campus.
“There hasn’t really been something this big before,” Reyes said. “This is the first year that we actually launched an Earth fair in honor of Earth Day.”
One of the major highlights of the fair was the dumpster dive, she said.
“We have a bunch of students that actually went inside the school’s dumpsters and took out the trash,” Reyes said. “They’re going to separate plastic from paper and glass and put it in recycle bins and … we’re going to take it to a recycling plant.”
The Downtown campus will be celebrating Earth Day on Wednesday starting at 11 a.m.
Thursday there will be an Earth Day fair from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the Tempe campus, and the launch of ASU’s Sustainable Phosphorus Initiative, which addresses the issue of phosphorus scarcity, the lack of sustainability and its use in agriculture.
Natalie Fleming, a sustainability sophomore and Undergraduate Student Government campus environment director, is helping to coordinate the Earth Day fair.
One new aspect of the fair is the “Pollinatrix,” where ASU alumna Lisa von Koch will attempt to engage students in environmental issues by dressing up in a bee costume and pretending to pollinate things.
“She basically started doing this because she found out about the collapsing bee population and what that means for our food system,” Fleming said.
On Friday there will be a waste audit from noon to 2 p.m. on Hayden Lawn in Tempe.
“It’s basically a way for us to determine how well people are recycling on campus,” Fleming said. “We’re going to take about five samples of trash bags around campus and then separate them out and figure out how much could’ve been recycled.”
The week will end with the “A” Mountain Restoration Project on Saturday from 8 to 9 a.m., where students, faculty and community volunteers will repair parts of the mountain damaged by storms and overuse.
For a full list of campus ‘Earth Week’ events, visit sustainability.asu.edu/earthweek
Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu
