Green Tees: Bags for a Better World gives students a chance to decrease their carbon footprint.
By Travis Coltrain
With climate change being a hot-button issue recently, some University of Iowa students are stepping up in an effort to reduce their carbon footprints.
By repurposing old T-shirts, four UI marketing major students have created a two part campaign: Green Tees: Bags for a Better World.
In the first part of this campaign, students collected old and unwanted T-shirts. Using these, they created reusable tote shopping bags. Their hope is students will begin to use these bags over plastic bags when they go shopping.
The second part of the campaign is based around the distribution of these bags.
“We let students bring in plastic bags in exchange for a reusable shopping bag,” UI junior Amy Schembari said. “Our goal is to raise awareness to conservation and to show people the different ways they can help the Earth.”
The campaign is a project for a marketing and sustainability class the students are taking, taught by David Collins, a lecturer in the Tippie College of Business. The assignment had to be involved with sustainability, meaning it had to include a long-term ecological balance that could sustain itself, UI senior Elizabeth Hubing said.
She said they had to present their project to the class, while also getting feedback from their instructor and peers alike. One of the suggestions they followed was a “pay it forward” campaign.
When giving a student a bag, they made sure to include a second bag inside, in hopes students will give a bag to another student they know needs one. Hubing said they use this “pay it forward” idea in hopes students will follow through with it.
“We put a bag inside a bag and encourage students to give it to their friends,” Hubing said. “Today, while we gave out about 20 people bags, in reality it was actually 40. We hope by doing this the message can be spread quicker.”
Environmental facts were put on the bags so students could also become aware to the growing climate issue, she said.
“One T-shirt takes 700 gallons of water to make; that’s enough drinking water for one person for 900 days,” Schembari said
Schembari said while many students were shocked by some of these facts, most were willing to help preserve the Earth in any way they could.
UI freshman Noah Nelson said that while there are many planets in the Solar System, there are none with an environment as unique as Earth’s.
“What we have is cosmic rarity, and we need to preserve that,” he said. “Let’s prevent an environmental crisis before we have to work on undoing one.”
Hubing and Schembari said while they had a good outcome on Tuesday, they hoped for an even better outcome later this week.
Anyone can help by donating plastic bags to the Green Tees project on Thursday between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. in the Pappajohn Business Building. Anyone who donates during this time will receive a free reusable shopping bag.
“It’s about repurposing and reusing what we can,” Schembari said.
