EcoCentro event will include presentations on campus sustainability and worm composting.
By Travis Doyle
sac-ranger@alamo.edu
Chad Batey, a pharmacy tech junior at the Feik School of Pharmacy at the University of the Incarnate Word, will discuss the consequences of pharmaceuticals on the environment at 3:30 p.m. Friday at Sinkin EcoCentro, 1802 N. Main Ave.
Batey, a former student at this college, will describe his family’s personal experience with how cancer-treating drugs can negatively affect the environment if improperly disposed.
“My sister was diagnosed with cancer growing up,” Batey said. “She would take the medication and it would leave her body and exit the septic system and the system would malfunction because of it. I want to educate people on the effects of drugs once they are used and disposed of, and how it affects the environment when people flush.”
Batey is one of several speakers at EcoExchangeEdu, a collaboration between different colleges that will showcase multiple aspects of environmental awareness from 3-6 p.m. Friday at EcoCentro.
The event will include students, faculty and staff from institutions such as Palo Alto College, Trinity University and Incarnate Word, EcoCentro Director Steven Lewis said.
“A great momentum is coming from all these different campuses,” Lewis said. “We invite students from our college to come over and enjoy and learn how they can incorporate sustainability into their life.”
There will be three presentation clusters from 3:30-6 p.m., in which multiple speakers from the various campuses will discuss their own topic.
The first cluster, 3:30-4:10 p.m., will include Palo Alto’s America Recycles Fashion Show, a presentation about Trinity University’s community garden, Batey’s talk on “Cancer Drugs, Sewage and Their Toll on Your Community” and “Sustaining Site: Mapping/Reading/Roaming,” a presentation by Dwayne Bohuslav, the program coordinator for the architecture department at this college.
The second cluster, 4:10-4:50 p.m., will include three presentations from Trinity University, “Individual Sustainability at TU”; “Creative Solutions”; and “Sustainable TU?”; and a presentation from Incarnate Word, “The Philosophy of Rochard Rorty and Environmentalism in the Century of Restoration.”
The third cluster, 4:50-5:20 p.m., will have two presentations from Trinity University: “The Sustainability of Storytelling: The Contribution of Folk Tales to German Environmental Discourse” and “Red Bricks/Green Campus – A Student’s Perspective on Sustainability.”
There will be a networking session and an open mic, in which Palo Alto student Versace Joseph Losoya will perform an eco-rap, “Recycle Recycle,” at 4:50 p.m.
Two demonstrations, “Potential to Save the World,” a showcase of sustainability- focused architecture projects at this college, and “Turn Our Organic Waste into ‘Black Gold’” with worm composting, will be going on throughout the day.
For more information, visit the EcoCentro page, www.facebook.com/EcoCentro1.