California State University, Northridge is known for its green campus. Its recently built Student Recreation Center is LEED Gold certified (to achieve Gold Status, the building must prove outstanding in five categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality), and CSUN’s fuel cell power plant — once the largest in the world — provides environmentally friendly power to the campus.

It’s no surprise, then, that the 2014 edition of Earth Day was met with an enthusiastic response from the campus, specifically the Associated Students arm of the university. Their Earth Fair was a a rousing success, with over 20 vendors and organizations like Zipcar, Flowater and the CSUN Institute for Sustainability providing information about sustainable efforts. This, along with giveaways, crafts and music and arts booths, gave the event a fun and educational feel.

“Earth Fair 2014 was yet another successful event brought to the students by Associated Students Productions,” said Associated Students Marketing and Public Relations Coordinator Kevin Mojaradi. “Our main goal was to bring attention to and celebrate our beautiful blue planet, which also happened to be the theme of the event. Overall, this successful event accomplished to give students a little environmentally friendly break from class.”

On a smaller scale, but no less important, the A.S. Recycling Center put together a waste audit of the surrounding areas of the Sierra Quad using 42 bins of trash provided by Power Plant Management (PPM). The goal of this audit is to find the amount and types of waste generated in one section of CSUN, and in turn, find identify opportunities to improve recycling and waste knowledge to students, faculty, and staff.

The A.S. Recycling Services center brought in a specific person to handle these projects, Natalia Iorlano, the group’s Recycling Special Projects Assistant. She notes that this being a campus-wide affair, there was help to undertake this very special project.

“With the help of efforts from the Institute of Sustainability and A.S. as a whole, this small project has been born,” Iorlano said. “We collected volunteers mainly within clubs and organizations on campus that are sustainability based. Because the freshmen class required reading is “Garbology”, we also looked to University 100 professors to include their students in this project.”

“On behalf of A.S. Recycling Services I would like to thank PPM for their cooperation and involvement in this event,” Iorlano said. “The Institute of Sustainability and Associated Students helped provide resources and tools for this event to be possible.”

At the time this post was published, the results of the waste audit had not been released. It will be updated when information warrants it.

Associated Students, Earth Fair