The Environmental Club at SHU

The Environmental Club at Sacred Heart University focuses on raising awareness for specific environmental issues and working to improve them. This club is representative of the growing state of young people becoming more environmentally conscious and striving to make impactful changes on issues such as pollution, conservation and recycling. 

“This club really focuses on helping our earth and community like no other club,” said junior Madison Murphy, Environmental Club member. “Our organization gets others involved and allows for our community to come together while cleaning and making our earth a better place to live.”

They have been collaborating with other organizations and having fundraisers to promote all of their environmental efforts. 

“We work on continuing to clean up our community and discard litter properly,” said Murphy.

All club members are passionate about educating themselves and educating the SHU community on the importance of environmentally-friendly practices. 

“Being environmentally friendly benefits not only us, but the world around us as well,” said Murphy. “It allows for cleaner air and a brighter future for generations to come.”

The club has been working on a composting initiative to help make SHU Dining more environmentally friendly. 

“That project will hopefully be operating in the dining halls,” said sophomore Amanda Malatak, the retention chair of the Environmental Club. 

Along with this, they have been working on a pollinator garden at West Campus, a garden planted predominantly with flowers and native species that provide nectar or pollen for a range of insects.

 “This garden will be a safe space for animals to live and where students can spend time outside,” said Malatak.

This semester, the club is bringing the SHU community together through events such as clean-ups, recycling days and volunteer days at the pollinator garden.

“We have many clean-ups this month. We are pushing our members and anyone, in general, to help with this cause,” said Matalak. “More recently, our members did a campus-wide clean up.”   

The club is actively looking to make improvements on the SHU campus, and their goals aim to make the campus more environmentally friendly. Another initiative they are tackling this year involves recycling, composting and waste reduction.

“Though the university has recycling bins, they are scarce. The recycling system that is set in place does not properly dispose of our recyclables,” said Malatak. “Sacred Heart, as of now, does not have any composting system in place. Our goal is to have the dining hall kitchens be responsible for separating the garbage. Everyday items are being wasted or not used to their full potential.” 

Many members of the club feel inspired by other members and the projects they have been working on.

“As an aspiring marine biologist, the environment is extremely important to me,” said Murphy. “Being involved in an organization where others have that same passion is amazing.”

The Environmental Club is always looking for new members to join their organization.

“When it comes to all this new policy we are trying to implicate into our school, it is a slow moving process. So we must get new members to carry out our programs so that hopefully, they will be accepted and implicated at Sacred Heart,” said Malatak.

The Environmental Club meets bi-weekly on Tuesdays at 7:00 in HC211.

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