As Earth Day approaches, students at the College of St. Scholastica are pushing for less waste on campus.
On Sunday, St. Scholastica's Student Senate passed a resolution calling on its school to phase out its use of plastic drinking straws and single-use plastic shopping bags. Student leaders at the school also requested that the school start charging at least 10 cents for every bag provided at a point of sale on campus.
Reid Peterson, a 19-year-old freshman student senator from Blaine, helped organize and lead the campaign to rein in plastic waste by targeting straws and bags.
"Those are two things that are really easy to change, and they're things that we can find other alternatives for that are much more eco-friendly," he said.
Jamie Harvie, a coordinator for Bag it Duluth, a city-wide effort to stem the use of disposable plastic shopping bags, is encouraged by the students' action and said older generations could learn from the example young people are setting. He noted that in the span of a few days students collected more than 400 signatures in support of the proposed measures designed to reduce plastic waste.
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"The straws and the bags I think are just really a metaphor of us trying to figure out how we realign ourselves with planetary processes," Harvie said.
Harvie noted that McDonald's Restaurants throughout the United Kingdom have stopped using plastic straws, and the state of California now requires retailers to charge a fee for plastic shopping bags.
"So what they're asking is just not cutting edge, quite frankly. But it feels like it is for Duluth," he said.
"For me, what's exciting about this is that these students are saying: Charge us for the bags," Harvie said. Other communities such as Washington, D.C., Seattle and Portland have seen fit to charge similar fees.
Peterson described feeling compelled to act.
"I think it says something about our generation of students. We kind of got dealt a rough hand, and we realized that in an age where climate change and your carbon footprint is always talked about, it's kind of up to us. We have to be leaders," he said.
The act of removing plastic bags and straws reminds people to ask themselves if they're living a sustainable life, Peterson said.
St. Scholastica's administration is likely to be receptive to the students' ideas about how to reduce plastic waste, judging by the comments of Bob Ashenmacher, the school's executive director of communications.
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"The college is guided by Catholic Benedictine values from its founders - the sisters of St. Scholastica Monastery. Among those values is stewardship, which includes using resources wisely and respectfully. We look forward to working with the Student Senate to fulfill our shared vision of a sustainable environmentally-friendly campus and college," he said in a prepared statement.
Advocates of the campus policy estimate it could reduce the number of plastic bags in circulation by about 135,000 annually.
Peterson said he hopes students at St. Scholastica, UMD and other schools also will push for greener policies on their respective campuses and community-wide.
"If we're going to be a force, I think we all need to work together," he said.
With only three weeks of school left to go at St. Scholastica before the summer break, Peterson aims to work with college administration in hopes of having new policies regarding plastic bags and straws in place when students return for classes in the fall.
