Sustainability Day at UW-Stout

>> My name is Mattie Keenan and we are here at the Child and Family Study Center.
I'm a teacher of four-year-old kindergartners, so my classroom is full of 19 four and five-year olds, and today we are outside winterizing our garden.
All of our children are four years old and five years old.
They are currently working on a project with our garden.
It started last spring, and today they are winterizing our garden.
The gardening has been a great aspect to our classroom because they have gotten to see the whole process.
They started the plants out in the greenhouse, and then they brought them over to our school and they got to help plant them in our garden and then throughout the summer they watched all the plants grow.
And we picked the green beans and the tomatoes and there is some broccoli growing in there, so we taste-tested those.
The children enjoy walking through the garden and then smelling the different scents that are there.
There's lots of rosemary and thyme in there.
And today they're like I said, winterizing the garden and just going to seeing the process of how we compost the materials and how they are going to save some of the stuff next year.
The hands-on is really great for these children, especially at this age.
It really gives them a sense of garden.
If they don't get to do it at home, they have a little bit at school, so that's fun.
They just really -- kids love to get dirty, so the garden is a good spot for that.
>> I'm Amy Murray.
I'm the plant science student, and today we're winterizing the Child Family Study Center garden.
The kids were helping us before, pulling out the plants that needed to be pulled out, and now we're mulching it, because you need to add in different nutrients for the soil over the winter so you can get better nutrients in the spring.
This is for Sustainable Agriculture Education Association, or SAEA.
We do educational aspects of sustainable agriculture, so gardening.
We try to reuse everything, and we also do a lot of different educational aspects like teaching people how to winterize gardens or what else have we done?
We are actually having another project coming up where we're going to help plant with the elderly and the assisted living home.
We also sell plants, anything you want to know about gardening basically.
Me and Katie, the vice president and president, we are Master Gardeners, so pretty much have a lot of knowledge that we want to share with everyone.
>> So basically what we just did is we took all the dead plants, left some of the dead plant matter on top, put a layer of new soil and then we're putting a layer of mulch.
So then over the winter it'll break down, it'll sit there and keep providing nutrients to the soil so that when it comes time for spring, we can rake in, put some new soil in and just start fresh.
>> Sustainable Agriculture Education Association, SAEA, is the group that we are a part of and means basically it's going to promote sustainable agriculture practices and try to implement them in the classroom and in the community and education's the key part, so we're hoping to learn by doing and learn by showing examples.
>> I'm Luke Hunter.
I'm one of the members of the Environmental Sustainability Steering Committee.
I am the vice president of Green Sense, I'm representing the organization, Environmental Sustainability Steering Committee.
One of the big things we are doing for first semester is putting on the Environmental Sustainability Day where we are giving out over 700 of these I Love Tap water bottles for free, and we're kind of giving these out as incentive for people to reuse water bottles and not be purchasing plastic ones.
One of our ultimate goals is we really want to make plastic water to be obsolete and not have people feel the need to use them at all.
>> My name is Justin Weilach [phonetic].
I'm the president of the Stout Cycling Club, and this here is Brian Braun.
He's our interim treasurer right now.
And we're working on the Stout Bikes.
It's a bike rental program that we have through the University.
Students can sign up for bikes and get them for free.
And we're just volunteering our time to work on the bikes a bit, get them up and running right now.
I'm working on group shift, trying to get the cable to work properly so that the bike will actually shift and get to class a little faster.
>> Hi. My name is Camille Thorsen [phonetic] and I'm the Student Sustainability specialist for campus here.
Today is National Campus Sustainability Day.
UW-Stout campus is a member of AASHE, which is the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education and is a national day where schools all around the nation are putting on different events for sustainability.