At a roundtable discussion last week, Kathleen Grady, the director of Sustainability at Temple, said students get a “bad rap” when it comes to taking care of their environment.
She isn’t wrong — students need to focus on living as sustainably as they can, whether they live on campus or off. It doesn’t need to be through grand gestures like building gardens, but in small changes to daily habits.
Save plastic containers from takeout and use them to store leftover food. Find out if and how your building recycles. Make sure the trash bags you use are strong and won’t break when you leave them out for the garbage trucks to pick up. If rotted food and household chemicals manage to get onto the sidewalk, they will contaminate runoff water in the city.
Students need to be aware of their waste and keep their homes, buildings and blocks as environment-friendly as possible.
Not only will this protect the environment more, it will foster cleaner streets and better living environments for everyone in the community.
“There’s a real energy in the student body to have an impact,” Grady told a collection of university and state organizations who will help set up a network of students to keep the blocks around Main Campus clean.
An environment is simply the place we live, and keeping those places clean and sustainable contributes to a better city overall.
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