Furman Greenbelt Sustainable Living Community

For the first time in decades, the United States is on the precipice of a Christmas tree shortage threatening to shatter the family tradition of picking out the perfect tree to spread holiday cheer. It turns out that the Great Recession from the early 2000’s caused a drastic drop in demand for Christmas trees. The old Druid tradition of dragging a live tree into a house is still a tradition in a modern times. Tree farmers plant new trees to replace their harvest each year. So, when consumers allocated their limited resources elsewhere, tree farmers could not plant the new crop to sell in the 13 to 14 year growing cycle.

Limited land, desired tree height, disease and drought all can have negative impacts on Christmas tree farmers. Consumers only desire a certain size that will fit in their house. Pines larger than six feet, and pines shorter than 4 feet are not desirable. The pines planted in the years before are too tall for most consumers. Conversely, the pines planted later are too short in stature. So in 2017, the repercussions of the recession are still being felt in a manner that probably wasn’t anticipated. A lot of consumers are considering buying artificial trees.

There are even some artificial tree manufacturers marketing their product as more sustainable than cutting down a perfectly healthy pine tree. What about the materials that go into producing the artificial tree? What is their composition? From where are they sourced? What are the transportation costs? How about fuel consumption and exhaust fumes? So, is the carbon footprint of an artificial tree larger than that of a real pine tree being harvested?

Farmers’ Markets all across the nation have seen a resurgence of popularity through farm to table initiatives. Will the same movement happen with local Christmas tree farmers?

-Sonia Clemens

Music festivals are a time to embrace new perspectives, connect with diverse groups of people, and enjoy great music but should this fun come at the cost of the earth? After attending Summer Set Music Festival this summer, I was astounded by the amount of waste left over. By the fourth day of the festival, a once pristine, beautiful campground was riddled with piles of crushed water bottles, left behind tents, and cigarette butts.

Although many festival goers are lovers of the environment, many become caught up in the hype oblivious to the waste they are creating. Music festivals produce on average 6 pounds of waste per person (Creative Carbon Scotland Music). That’s almost twice the national average! For a music festival such as Bonnaroo or Lallapalooza with over 60,000 people over 720 tons of waste is produced not including the fuel for stages and shuttles or the waste produced by vendors themselves. Typically once people enter the campsite there is no leaving, so the music venues must take action in advance to provide sustainable options and inform people of how they can prepare.
Here are a few options music festival venues could employ to reduce the amount of waste:
1. Provide campers with a green guide after buying tickets to help them pack sustainably with reusable bags or water bottles
2. Have water stations available so that campers may refill their water bottles or packs
3. Give each car entering the campsite a recycling bag which they can drop off after the festival to be properly disposed of
4. Offer free t-shirts, rides, or reusable water bottle for bringing in empty plastic water bottles or used cigarette butts. Currently Coachella offers a free reusable water bottle for every ten empty plastic water bottles campers recycle.
5. Have a bike parking lot to encourage festival goers to not use the shuttles
6. Make sure charity boxes are available at the end of the festival for unwanted items like tents.
7. Require food vendors to use recyclable plates, utensils, and cups

As a camper you can even reduce waste before you enter the festival by carpooling to the grounds with three or more people in order to reduce fuel usage. Carpoolchella is an app where Cochella festival goers who ride with four or more in a car can be entered into a raffle to win prizes!

Have a fun, hippie, and sustainable music festival!

-Kelsey DiMarco

References:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.mindbodygreen.com/articles/can-a-music-festival-be-100-percent-sustainable-7-creative-ways-festivals-are-getting-close

Connecting arts and sustainability

http://www.conservationvalue.org

If you have been living in a shell the last month or have trouble seeing then you probably didn’t notice the bright orange bikes EVERYWHERE around campus.  Spin bikes are spreading across the country, and influencing others to adopt a more sustainable alternative to driving.

“In its first 20 days, SPIN saw 656 unique riders and 4,500 rides more rides at Furman in the first week than did Seattle, Spin’s inaugural launch site” (1).What is all the hype around spin bikes? I mean bikes have been around for hundreds of years; the earliest bicycle being a wooden scooter-like contraption called a celerifere, invented around 1790 by a guy named Comte Mede de Sivrac. What’s so cool about spin bikes is that they are one of the first dockless bike sharing programs to launch across the U.S. with their Spin Cities Project launching first in Seattle.

A lot of my friends (and maybe sometimes me too) drive to class when we are running late in the morning or just around campus on a busy day. It only takes at most about 15 minutes to walk to any place on campus; although some of us like to convince ourselves that we don’t have 15 minutes in our busy day to spare. Then why not use our own bikes that a good percentage of our students have here on campus? It’s all about convenience, sometimes I don’t want to have to worry about riding my bike everywhere around campus during a school day and having to worry about locking it up every time and weaving in and out between the busy students waking between the academic buildings; sometimes Isimply prefer talking and walking besides classmates as well.  Spin has no obligations, you can leave it anywhere and you can lock it with a click of a button

I use Spin bike almost 4 days aweek and it has become such a great  way to get around campus. I have stopped driving my car around campus and I am rarely late to class anymore. My boyfriend and I can finally go on bikes rides together and take quick trips down trough the Swamp Rabbit Trail to have lunch in Travelers Rest. Majority of students don’t use their cars further than 5-10 miles from campus so Spin bikes are great for eliminating unnecessary car usage within short distances, limiting the pollution in cities and campuses.  Let me just say, I am a fan of Spin bikes and would recommend them to other students and other campuses to give them a try for their superb ease of use.

– Natalia Baldwin

 

 

 

References

1. https://news.furman.edu/2017/11/02/furman-taking-dockless-bike-share-program-for-a-spin/
2. https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/7/17/15980792/spin-orange-bike-share-launch
3. https://www.spincities.org

Here at a small, liberal arts university you wouldn’t think that food waste would be much of a problem. However, in an era of convenience and material goods, most people on campus take the accessibility of food for granted. We don’t need to worry about where our food is coming from, whether it will be available, how many resources went into cooking it, or where our scraps go after we finish our meal. The concept of the clean plate club flew out the window as soon as we left Mom’s domain.

As part of Furman’s sustainability initiative, we compost all the food waste created by the dining hall and from several other places on campus. On average we process more than 32 tons of food waste per year, most of which is composted. However, we only seem to use a minuscule portion of the compost, most significantly on Furman’s organic farm.

In our little Furman bubble we do not often think about our own wastefulness and its impact on our community and the rest of the world. There are people in our community who may not know where their next meal is coming from, while we continue to throw away huge proportions of food. We also expend resources (i.e. time, effort, energy as natural gas and electricity) in composting the food, the value of which exceeds the compost’s usefulness on our campus. In light of this, I find our wastefulness both unsustainable and disheartening to those less fortunate. However, I think that composting the food waste on campus is a wonderful idea, as it keeps most of the waste from entering landfills and generating leachate, and stopping this entirely would be a step in the wrong direction. But, the sheer volume of our output is far too great for our small size. There must be a change in this system moving forward.

Ideally, we would decrease our food waste and replace the chemical fertilizers that we currently use in landscaping with the mature compost. The dining hall could make changes as giving smaller portions, offering samples of the foods, or allowing students to serve themselves at some lines. Making the campus’ compost available as a marketable item for local farmers is also a good option. These changes could greatly benefit the campus, not just in the food waste, but with removing some of the harmful chemicals from our landscaping process. However, none of these suggestions are ‘one size fits all’ and though they could be successful in other situations, it does not mean they will be on this campus. For this reason, I think the school should encourage ongoing conversation to help evaluate and correct this system as it develops. I hope that through ventures like this, we can grow to more mindful of our actions and become better stewards of our planet.

Mikaela Williams

The company Nike, a major sports clothing and shoes distributor around the world, has made huge steps towards a more eco-friendly and sustainable style of production and manufacturing. The company released three goals as part of their sustainability project, which are to “minimize environmental footprint, transform manufacturing, and unleash human potential.” Nike has strived towards these goals by making changes in their factories and materials as well as by reaching out to young children to stress the importance of physical activity.

Several ways that Nike has altered its production style are shown through the use of different shoe technology, water-conserving techniques, and energy cuts. Nike has introduced a new shoe material called Flyknit technology, which provides the maximum structural support for athletes while remaining lightweight and easy to wear during physical activity. While providing the shoes needed for athletes to perform to their best ability, Flyknit technology also produces 60 percent less waste than traditional methods of making shoes. Along with a different shoe technology, the company has also introduced new methods of saving water during production in factories. Nike has started using a new dying method called ColorDry, which dyes fabric without using water. To make better use of recyclable and reusable trashed materials, Nike has found a way to utilize plastic bottles and material from old original Nike material to produce new clothes and shoes. Between 2008 and 2016, the company has rerouted more than 3 billion plastic bottles headed for the landfill and has instead turned these bottles into recycled polyester for Nike products. Also, the new plan Nike Grind has been introduced to use materials from older clothing as the framework for new clothing, saving fabric. In order to conserve energy, the Nike footwear manufacturers have cut down on energy needed and emissions generated to make shoes by 50 percent, saving company money while also helping the environment.

Along with making changes in the factory setting, Nike has also strived to push children to live more active lifestyles, which is another essential part of sustainability because it has been proven that physically active people are happier, healthier, and more vibrant. In order to influence this healthier way of life, Nike has reached out to schools around the world to spread awareness of the physical inactivity epidemic and to influence children to get up and moving as often as possible. By working with movements such as Let’s Move! Active Schools, Nike has impacted the lives of children across the globe by influencing healthy physical activity.

Clearly, Nike has made some serious changes to company habits and partnerships to make it a more sustainable business. These changes impact lives everywhere because Nike is a major sportswear company with lots of influence on the economy of the world and the depletionor conservation of natural resources.

Source: http://news.nike.com/news/sustainable-innovation

~Danni Vines

Compost.

Did you just picture a stinky pile of rotting fruits and veggies? Then you’re in the same boat as the majority of Americans. Composting sounds scary, but if it’s done right, it’s actually a simple, sustainable, and stink-free way to save money, create less waste, and make your own organically fertilized soil!

At the beginning of the school year, I was eager to try my hand at composting, but I didn’t how to do. After some coaching from Bruce the farm manager though, the Cabin was ready to try composting in the Tumbleweed behind our new home.

The basic principle behind composting is simple: let nature do its work. Soil contains natural microorganisms that break down organic matter, so in order to have a healthy compost pile, you want to make an environment to speed up this process of natural decomposition (as opposed to molding and rotting). For us, this meant getting a mix of partially-decomposed leaves, soil that already contained some compost from the Farm, a few banana peels, and coffee grounds.  That was it! And the compost pile was ready to go.

We keep an over-sized mason jar in the fridge to put compostable materials in and then empty it into the tumbleweed about once a week. We compost egg shells, fruit and veggie scraps, tea bags, coffee grounds, and paper napkins but make sure to exclude non-compostable material like meet scraps, dairy products, and very oily or molded foods. Everything seemed to be going according to plan…

Until we started seeing green bags of trash periodically appear in our tumbleweed. Someone in the community must have thought it was a trashcan. To solve the problem, we labeled the compost bin “Not a trashcan!” and when that didn’t work, we tried a different approach: “If you would like to compost with us please contact us at this email address.” We eagerly awaited an email from the mystery want-to-be-composter, but heard nothing. About every week another bag of trash would appear and I would take it out and throw it away. We were stumped.

Finally, we caught the culprit! …who wasn’t actually a culprit… and wasn’t actually putting trash in the compost bin. It turns out, that one of my own cabin mates was using green, compostable plastic bags to bring waste from the environmental science department to add to our compost bin. The mystery was solved! We could once again rest in peace.

Ansley Glenn ’20

 

source: http://www.bhg.com/gardening/yard/compost/how-to-compost/

Image from: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/91/d6/55/91d655912d3682c48479f0a4ad306c6c.jpg

A lyric from a song by my favorite band Fall Out Boy goes “But there’s a light on in Chicago, and I know I should be home.” I was listening to this song when it hit me: there are lights on all the time on Furman’s campus. Obviously, we need street lights so people feel safe walking on campus at night, but inside the buildings is a different story.

I spend a lot of time in Trone at night with meetings, and my biggest pet peeve is when I walk downstairs to retrieve my bike and look into P2X. All the lights are on, and the big TV in the back is on, but I never see anyone. They may be in the back unloading packages, which I understand, but maybe they could turn off the lights in the front part of the room where students usually wait for packages. To give Trone some credit, I know some of the offices and the student organization commons have timers and sensors, so after a certain amount of time, the light will turn off. I think the sensor light system could also be beneficial in the dorms for the hallways, bathrooms, and laundry rooms. Another quick note that isn’t just about lights is that some of the projectors in Furman Hall are still on at night, even when the rest of the lights are off, and I’m not quite sure how to fix this problem, but I’m sure there is some technology that allows for a time system for the projector to turn off after a certain time.

The lights outside of Furman need a little change, too. In particular, the lights on the sports fields are incredibly bright. I have passed by these fields at night, and the fields looks like daytime. I don’t know if there is a way to use a more efficient light or find a way to alternatively power the lights. I always wondered if there is a way to connect more of the PAC exercise machines to the power system, and maybe some of those machines could help provide some of the energy for those lights. Another thing I was thinking about is if during the day, a power source could charge to be used when the lights are on at night practices.

While I am not sure how to solve all these problems, I think it is certainly a topic worth discussing and not a topic to be taken lightly.

 

Peace, love, and Greenbelt,

Katherine Kristinik

 

Picture Source:

https://m.aliexpress.com/item/32384622617.html

If you’re anything like me, you probably jam out to John Mayer every morning to get inspired for the day. If you’re even more like me, you listen to “Waiting on the World to Change,” so ridiculously loud that you could probably wake up your neighbors.

 

Until recently, I didn’t quite understand how easy it was to begin living a sustainable lifestyle. See here’s the thing, we’re always talking about waiting for the world to change but the honest truth is, the world isn’t going change without initiating any type of change.

 

I always had this preconceived notion that living sustainably requires an immeasurable amount of effort and a dramatic life change.

 

Let me be the first to openly admit that my assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth.

 

I am afraid of change, big or small. I like sticking to current circumstances and being comfortable. But what if I told you that stepping out of your comfort zone could be one of the best decisions you’ve ever made.

 

After our very first class, I realize how similar I was to my classmates. See I also struggle with using plastic water bottles instead a permanent water bottle. I also drive myself to class or the gym on occasion. I also have way too many unnecessary lights turned on at one time and my biggest secret: sometimes when I’m cold I heat up my blanket in the dryer.

 

My first step was switching over to a permanent water bottle provided by the lovely EES department at Furman. At first it was hard, I’m not going to lie. I had to keep up with my water bottle and wash it and refill it. On the other hand, I am saving a fortunate on not buying plastic water bottle or the gas to go buy the plastic water bottles. My second was to make sure all my lights were turned off. When thinking about it, that saves so much money too.

 

But at the end of the day, its not about the money or the lifestyle we should be worried about. It’s all about this beautiful planet called Earth. See, I dream about having a big family with kids. What if the decisions I made yesterday, today, and tomorrow affect the environment that my kids will grow up in one day? Well they do. It starts with us. It starts with taking that first step: big or small. I still struggle everyday, but it’s worth it. It’s worth starting this “new lifestyle.” Take your first step today, it’s the only way the world changes.

 

Fabby Gonzalez, 2019

Furman’s campus is beautiful. Perfectly trimmed grass and bushes, pretty flowers everywhere. It’s beautiful… until you get to the Greenbelt. The landscape of the Greenbelt consists of really tall but patchy grass, and a few trees. While the landscape provides the houses with good shade and privacy, there is a big problem, as any Greenbelt resident has noticed, with clay runoff.

The grass planted around the houses is very tall, but is a clump type grass that allows for a lot of extra space between each plant, and because the houses are on an incline, any rain that runs down the slope takes a lot of clay with it. Now, if any of you have ever been riding down a state highway, or an interstate, you may have noticed the grass that grows fairly tall and blows as trucks pass it; this is bahiagrass. Bahiagrass is planted along the roads for multiple reasons: it is extremely tolerant to high heat, and it grows and spreads very quickly to eliminate any kind of erosion along the roadways.

I believe that the landscaping around the Greenbelt should definitely take planting this type of grass around the houses, in addition to the grass and plants that are already there. Bahiagrass goes to seed very quickly, and any time the wind blows it spreads itself out until, like you see along roads, it is covering every bit of dirt. Beyond just the erosion issues, bahiagrass can grow very tall (though not as tall as the grass that is already planted), and it can grow very thick as well. This grass would NOT be cut by the landscapers, and would therefore grow up to 2-3 feet tall, and would cover all of the dirt in a very short amount of time after planting. This tall grass would shade the soil, which would keep soil temperatures low and allow the grass to continue growing and spreading, which would in turn lower the level of clay erosion, and make the soil around our quaint little village healthier and sturdier.

-John Martinson

Source: https://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/sustainag/cc-gm/bahiagrass.html