ATTENDEES: Ben Farrell, Paula Staight, Christine Thompson, Jim Blick
Announcements
The Recycled Paper Policy has been updated on the University web site.
UO Recycling won an American Forest Paper Association award, which they will share with the University of Colorado.
The movie Blue Vinyl will be shown on April 18 th. After the movie there will be a panel discussion with David Monk and Lisa Arkin from the Oregon Toxics Alliance. Ben Farrell will also be on the panel to discuss EIC’s role in initiating awareness and change on campus.
Visiting Law Professor Hari Osofsky will speak about geography and climate change litigation at the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program’s fireside conversations on April 19th.
Smoking Free Campus
Paula distributed a page from the Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) web site ( http://no-smoking.org ) announcing that Calabasas, California, has enacted legislation to make it the first truly smoke-free city.
A group of health and college professionals have utilized the initiatives from the Healthy People document to create one for Healthy Campuses. One of the goals is to decrease the number of people smoking on campuses by the year 2010 to 10.5%. Tobacco use presents one of the greatest risks to the future health of college students compared with alcohol, cocaine, crack, heroin, homicide, suicide, car crashes, fires, and AIDS combined. Two years ago approximately 21% of the students at the University of Oregon smoked, which was actually below the national average. Paula points out that smoking benches, as well as cigarette butt receptacles, create a situation of social normalization and a living learning environment that promotes rather than inhibits smoking.
The subcommittee will need to talk with Kay Coots about the distance issue first. Christine suggested that the next step should be a broader discussion about standardization and implementation that would include the students, campus planning, and all auxiliaries.
Refillable Cups
In response to Karyn Kaplan’s e-mail about refillable cup promotion, Chris Jones suggested that charging 25 cents for a disposable cup would provide a greater incentive then offering the 25 cent discount. The committee thought this was a very good idea, and will ask Karyn for her thoughts at the next month’s meeting.
The next Environmental Issues Committee meeting will be held on Monday, May 15, from 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. at the EMU Metolius Room