With a week and a half left in my contract with LSPIRG now seems as good a time as any to reflect on my work experience as an environmental researcher.
My first completed project as LSPIRG Environmental Researcher is a 14 page guide for students, entitled Living Green at Laurier, that provides information on how to minimize your environmental impact while at WLU. If you want to find out if you can recycle sticky notes, where bike racks are located on campus, whether to use paper towels or a hand dryer, or the environmental benefits of different food diets then this guide will no doubt be of use to you. The guide has been included on usb keys going out to first year students and will soon be available on both the LSPIRG webpage as well as WLU’s sustainability web page at www.wlu.ca/sustainability.
Currently I am finishing up a couple other projects before the end of the summer. The first is a guide that focuses on minimizing the environmental impact of organizations on campus (working groups, clubs, etc.) from green catering, to transportation, to office supplies. In addition, I will be preparing feedback on LSPIRG’s current Green Policy and possible amendments that I envision given my summer research and my policy background. In the next few days I will be finishing an environmental directory that will list contacts for all the environmental groups at WLU, UW, as well as environmental community groups in Waterloo region. This directory will help in organizing events and collaborating with other groups that share an environmental goal.
Lastly, I am working with Sarah English, the sustainability coordinator at WLU, about getting an e-waste bin (or possibly multiple bins) on campus for students to properly dispose of computers, cartridges, monitors, and other electronic waste. With good planning, this project, like the others, will be complete by the end of the August.
After four years at WLU as an environmentally minded student and a community activist on environmental issues, having access to these files would have been of great help and I’m tremendously grateful that I could spend my summer working on them for current and future WLU students as well as the community at large.
Griffin Carpenter