'Green Game' collects materials for recycling

By Zoe Del Rosario

UIW hosted its first-ever Green Game during the men’s and women’s basketball games on Thursday, Feb. 17 at the McDermott Center to raise awareness about recycling and composting on campus.

During the event, the Sustainability Advisory Board, the school’s student sustainability organization, UIW Sustain, students in the Ecocriticism course, and volunteers, placed recycling bins and organic material bins around the McDermott Center.

They helped collect the recyclable and organic materials from these bins and weighed them to compete in an initiative by the National Wildlife Federation called, The Campus Race to Zero Waste.

According to the chair of the Sustainability Advisory Board and organizer of the Green Game, Dr. Benjamin Miele, The Campus Race to Zero Waste is a competition inviting colleges across the nation to limit the amount of waste on their campuses.

The initiative used to be called Recycle Mania, but the National Wildlife Federation renamed it last year to include more than just recycling in the competition, Miele said.

“They’ve since changed it so it’s not just emphasizing recycling and a big part of that change is growing awareness of you know, some of the complicated aspects of recycling,” said Miele. “It’s also not really telling the story about how we can become a zero-waste society.”

Attendees at UIW’s Green Game had the opportunity to learn about ongoing efforts to make the campus more sustainable.

UIW Sustain set up a booth at the event to gain support for their organization and encourage attendees to support their petition for UIW to divest from fossil fuels and reinvest into local, eco-friendly and sustainable options.

“Our goal is to get more student support, interaction, and engagement with the green activities here at UIW,” said Miranda Van Doren, the vice president of UIW Sustain.

Compost Queens, a San Antonio composting service, was also present in the Green Game to teach the UIW community about Bokashi, a form of composting.

According to the chief operating officer of Compost Queens, Alma Rominger, Bokashi composting is a composting method where you ferment your food scraps, meaning it controls the odor and allows for other important fertilizing properties.

“The Bokashi actually helps to break down the material way quicker once it’s in the soil or in a compost pile, so it’s really great all around,” said Rominger.

In addition to the learning opportunities at the Green Game, a group of UIW students was selected to participate in a halftime trivia contest about recycling and other environmental initiatives. These students received a variety of prizes for their participation.

Miele said the Green Game had been in discussion for years, but they were able to make it happen this semester due to support from different organizations at UIW.

There had been other green events at UIW before, but this was the first event tied to the National Wildlife Federation competition, according to Miele.

The sustainability groups at UIW are now planning to repeat the Green Game activities at a football game in the fall, and host other environmentally friendly activities including a green fundraising event.

However, Miele shared that they want to do more than single events. He said that the focus

after the Green Game is to start a larger project on campus proposed by the Sustainability

Advisory Board and UIW Sustain.

“Next year we really want to ramp this up, we want to move from single events or single buildings, or you know this one-time thing,” Miele said. “We don’t want to do the one-time thing alone; we want to do that, and a campus wide move towards zero waste.”

Read story at UIW's student newspaper, the Logos.