Although reducing, reusing and recycling are being addressed in many ways on the Morningside and CUMC campuses, three projects stand out. They're Give + Go Green, organized by the undergraduate Eco-Reps in collaboration with Housing & Dining; Clean + Go Green, sponsored by Facilities; and Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, coordinated by students at the Mailman School of Public Health.

Give + Go Green began in 2005 as Dump and Run. Sponsored by Housing & Dining in collaboration with EarthCo Green Campus and Community Initiative, its purpose was to collect books, clothing, furniture and food that might otherwise have been discarded during Move-Out. Donations were given to local not-for-profit agencies.

In 2006, Housing & Dining and students from several environmental groups hoped to build on the project's original success. So they created Give + Go Green whose donations, including 500 pounds of food to City Harvest and a full Salvation Army truck, far exceeded the previous year's.

This year's Give + Go Green donations were four times the amount of the 2006 collection. "Pretty amazing," says Herman Matte, executive director, Dining Services Controllers Office.

Clean + Go Green began several years ago as Dumpster Days, an opportunity for faculty and staff to clean their office or workspace and purge unwanted clutter in an environmentally friendly way. The name was changed last year to emphasize the "greenness" of the event, and also to complement what was already happening on the Give + Go Green side.

Facilities provided collection bins at strategic campus locations as well as help in moving cumbersome items. They also separated the items for environmentally sound recycling.

Clean + Go Green will take place again in -August.

And this spring, a group of students at the Mailman School of Public Health widened the stewardship umbrella. Students for Environmental Action held the first of what they called their "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" initiative on the Columbia University Medical Campus.

Give + Go Green Counts Success by the Truckload

The black plastic trash bags Columbia students dragged down W. 116^th St. were mostly crammed with clothes – as often as not, brand new. They toted the rest – canned goods, lamps, fans, refrigerators and TVs – in their arms.

It was the early afternoon of May 9 and the first hours of this year's Give + Go Green, whose goal is that others in Upper Manhattan might benefit from students' "stuff" that might otherwise be thrown away at the end of the semester.

For a total of 12 hours from May 9 to May 11, at three locations on the Morningside campus, Eco-Reps received donations virtually non-stop. And on May 19, Senior Check-Out day, there were lots more.

The final tally: nearly four 26-foot Salvation Army trucks filled with Give + Go Green contributions, and another Salvation Army truckful from Senior Check-Out.

Food donations to City Harvest, a nonprofit organization that picks up excess food from restaurants and other sources, collected 400 pounds from Give + Go Green, and 800 pounds from Senior Check-Out. According to City Harvest's guideline, one pound of food equates to one meal. That means Columbia's efforts have provided 1200 meals to needy persons in the five boroughs through community food programs.

On May 9, Eco-Reps Erin McMahon, CC '09; Julie Raskin, CC '08; and Acadia Roher, Barnard '10, set up the collection point on 116^th St., just outside Wien Court. Behind them, a Salvation Army truck they helped load to half full by mid-afternoon.

Dustin Tillman, CC '07, was one of the first to arrive "because I have a bunch of stuff people can use," he said. "A lot of the stuff I haven't even used."

Another member of the Class of '07, Alex Krul, dropped off a small refrigerator, a teak futon and a load of clothes. "I don't need them and I figure somebody else might," he said.

A number of donors said they'd come by because they'd been alerted by the Eco-Reps' extensive publicity campaign – tables, flyers, posters across the campus and cards slipped under doors in the residence halls. "I had a card under my door, and I didn't want to throw stuff out," said Carling Donovan, CC '10.

The Eco-Reps are a student organization dedicated to sustainability awareness among their fellow students. Hannah Lee, EEE '09, and Ariel Zucker, CC '09, are the program's co-leaders and primary student organizers of Columbia's second Give + Go Green.

Herman Matte, executive director, Dining Services Controllers Office, attributes this year's fourfold increase in donations to two things: "The Eco-Reps themselves are a more mature program this year, and the Columbia community is much more aware of being 'green.'"

Matte says the learning curve for organizing Give + Go Green was up from last year. Housing & Dining and the Eco-Reps did a thorough review of the 2006 effort, then built on its strengths and revised as needed.

One target area was the group of about 1000 seniors left on campus after Move-Out. "We didn't do that as effectively or aggressively last year," he says.

Students for Environmental Action Hold Successful "Reuse" Project

At the Mailman School of Public Health on the Columbia University Medical School campus, there's a newly organized group of environmentally conscious students who are eager to make a difference.

Among their first projects was what they called simply "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" – an attempt to collect clothing, school supplies and food that would otherwise be thrown away as students left campus at semester's end.

Because this was a first-time effort at CUMC, members of Students for Environmental Action had to start from scratch, arranging everything from storage space to shipping to getting the word out across the campus.

The original plan was to collect items at the mini-walkway between Bard Hall and Tower I for two hours a day over two days, said MSPH second-year student SashtiBalasundaram. A strong response, however, drove the collection to five days.

"We just kept it going because it was so successful," said Molly Franks, MSPH '07.

Franks said the clothing and school supplies filled six very large packing boxes, most of which will be sent to Rwanda in collaboration with the Global Health Forum.

The students sorted out heavy clothing inappropriate for a warm climate and filled a huge bin for Goodwill Industries on 181^st St. "We pushed it up there ourselves," said Tamara Montacute, a second-year MSPH student.

The food went to agencies in Washington Heights and Morningside Heights.

Franks is heading back to home to Portland, OR, with her new degree and a plan to work with young people in school-based health care dealing with reproductive health. The collection project heartened her, she said, because of its emphasis on "reusing what otherwise would be thrown away and raising consciousness of reuse."

Yet, on another level, she said, "it's kind of disheartening to see so many brand-new things, and how much people accumulate what they don't need. Working for social change we need to encourage people not to buy things."

Montacute said she's "very excited to get something started on the CUMC campus." She described a lot of interest among students in the Towers on the Medical Campus and across all the schools.

"Most significant is just the fact that people weren't throwing these things away, and we were providing the outlet for them to do that," she said. "We were teaching also – showing them they didn't have to throw things out."

Montacute is in the MSPH Global Health track, and about to leave for a five-month practicum in Panama.

Come fall, Students for Environmental Action expects to be an official CUMC campus group. Balasundaram said he and other members met recently with MSPH Assistant Director of Student Affairs Mariaelena Barbosa and are finalizing the paperwork required for official status.

Balasundaram is spending the summer in Puerto Rico on a water-monitoring project.

---- Barbara King Lord

Photographs by Lisa Miller:
1. Students participate in Give + Go Green at the College Walk collection point on May 10. Photo by Lisa Miller.
2. Members of Students for Environmental Action organize clothing and school supplies contributed for reuse, mostly in Rwanda. From left, Neda Dowlatshahi, Tamara Montacute, student donor. Photo by Sashti Balasundaram.
3. A Salvation Army truck is one of five filled with student contributions during Give + Go Green. Photo by Lisa Miller.
4. Clothing, small appliances, furniture sorted by Eco-Reps stand ready for loading on Salvation Army trucks. Photo by Lisa Miller.
5. Bins for donations filled and refilled quickly at Give + Go Green collection points. Photo by Lisa Miller.
6. Posters created by Students for Environmental Action call attention to the end-of-semester collection on the CUMC campus. Photo by Sashti Balasundaram.
7. The growing collection of clothing, school supplies and food contributed at CUMC in the end-of-semester campaign organized by Students for Environmental Action. Photo by Sashti Balasundaram.
8. Tamara Montacute works the collection area at CUMC. Photo by Sashti Balasundaram.