2015-2016

Xavier Sustainability Club helped facilitate Muskie Move-In recycling efforts. Club leaders coordinated with volunteers to have three separate locations where freshman could drop off cardboard boxes to be recycled. Physical plant workers drove around to pick up flattened cardboard pieces that they would then bale and send to the recycling center.

 

 

The club also volunteered at the NEXUS community garden located on Xavier's campus. This volunteer opportunity was coordinated through Community Action Day (CAD) which occurs every spring and fall semester. The club is encouraged to keep finding sustainable volunteer opportunities and reach out to those organizations for future CAD's.

 

 

For the year, our project was to build bat boxes/houses for local little brown bats. Students ordered and hand built bat boxes. Later in the year, some of the bat boxes were donated to Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation and Madisonville Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation. One bat box was donated to David Lococo, an active member within the Xavier Community. As of December 2016, there are four remaining boxes.

 

One student, Carmelle Wasch, led a program called Take Back the Tap (TBTT) which promotes the use of reusable water bottles and tap water over bottled water. TBTT garnered over 1000 signatures from students who support a full or partial water bottle ban and who have committed to not buying bottled water. Xavier came in second place in the competition to earn the most signatures, and the winning school received a prize of a free water bottle filler. In early 2015, Elkay donated an older model of a water bottle filling machine to Xavier, which is now located on the top floor of the McDonald Library.

Xavier Student Sustainability invested in a garden plot at NEXUS in the summer of 2016. However, due to lack of student availability during the summer, the plot was shut down at the end of the 2016 school year.

 

In April of 2016, Xavier Student Sustainability hung up bat houses around our campus. There is one located on a tree facing the turf soccer field underneath Elet Hall, and another one located facing the intramural fields in the trees across the road. There is an additional bat house that was hung up near the NEXUS garden, close to two original bat houses. With the help of a physical plant truck and some workers with some tall ladders, XSS completed their project to buy, build, and hang up bat houses in the Xavier community.