In celebration of National Campus Sustainability Day, about 25 groups gathered Wednesday on Ho Plaza to educate one another and other members of the Cornell community on their initiatives.

Campus Sustainability Day is a national event, celebrated in universities across the country. The event is held about six months from Earth Day so that there is an Earth-related event in both semesters of the academic year.

“Basically, it’s an event to celebrate and bring awareness to student organizations and departments at Cornell that are devoted to sustainability,” Sustainability Hub President K.C. Alvey ’12 said.

Club members manned tables along Ho Plaza on the sunny, though blustery, fall day. Many featured poster boards and interactive activities, such as Take Back the Tap’s tap water challenge, which challenged students to tell the difference between bottled water and municipal water.

The Society for Natural Resource Conservation booth presented information about PVCs, or polyvinal chlorides, which are the third most harmful type of plastic. PVCs are used in construction as well as items like shower curtains. SNRC president Anna Plattner ’12 asked students to pose in front of a makeshift shower with a speech bubble saying “Mmm... nothing like a nice hot shower with 108 toxins. No to PVC!” SNRC plans to launch a PVC-free campaign at Cornell and ask the University to take it out of building materials, according to Plattner.

 Big Red Bikes, the initiative to start a bike share program on campus, displayed its prototype bike. The bike, which is red and has a step-through frame, will come to campus after spring break, when plans for the bike share program are finalized. “We want to increase the bike culture on campus,” said Sarita Upadhyay ’11, a member of the sustainability hub and leader of the big red bikes initiative.

Habitat for Humanity collaborated with Bling Nation to fundraise. Bling Nation, a company that recently expanded to Collegetown, enables people to put a chip on their cell-phone and pay for items through a Pay-Pal account. It is a green technology because it sends the receipts to the customer via text message, eliminating the need for a paper transaction, according to Harshvardhan Chamria ’11.

“[Sustainability Day] shows how diverse sustainability is on campus,” Alvey, the Sustainability Hub president, said. “Cornell is doing a lot, especially with student effort.”

The Cornell Computer Reuse Association, another organization at Sustainability Day, allows people to donate old computers, which it either recycles or fixes and donates to non-profits. The club has donated more than 1,200 computers to places around the world and to locally.

Cornell University Sustainable Design, a student-led design and building initiative, is in the planning phase of building a schoolhouse in South Africa, using sustainable techniques and local building materials. It is also building an on-campus research facility at Cornell, near the Vet School, which will be an active lab for energy research. 

Cornell Environmental Health and Safety highlighted programs to make laboratories safer and more sustainable. The organization advocates exchanging mercury thermometers for non-mercury thermometers because the University spent $20,000 cleaning up mercury spills last year.

“It’s great to be able to collaborate and coordinate more,” Alvey said. “It’s important to make connections about how each are an aspect of sustainability. We can be encouraged, and learn from each other.”

“It can be hard to communicate between the different groups, but it’s very important to because we can all be stronger by working together,” Sustainability Hub member Christina Stiller ’11 said.

Amy Allen ’14, a member of the Sustainability Hub, said that she was “blown away by the different groups” and that “not many other schools have this.”