Vet Students Impacting Environmental Health

Charlotte Weisberg, University of Pennsylvania

In the spring semester of 2019 I took on the position of Environmental and Sustainability Coordinator in the student-run One Health Club at PennVet. As a brand new position, the responsibilities were ultimately up to my own discretion. I immediately took this as an opportunity to improve the local community here at PennVet and our collective mindset toward environmentalism. The initial focus of these projects was improving waste management at our school, with a long-term goal of adapting perspectives of students and faculty to embrace environmental health in every aspect of their daily lives and careers. With the aid of Penn Sustainability group and our own facilities coordinators, I was able to install PennVet's first ever composting program in our buildings. The composting collection has now been running for several months and has been ultimately very successful. With the option to compost food waste at the school, students and faculty have significantly helped to decrease overall trash output. Additionally, this program has encouraged many students to invest in composting options at home and to re-think their buying choices with a focus on minimal waste. In addition to the composting program, the One Health Club improved our environmental component at this year's annual One Health Symposium. As the third tier of One Health, Environmental Health is often overlooked. We made it a mission this year to better incorporate this theme into our symposium with lunch and dinner talks focused on health professional's potential roles in improving environmental health. Simultaneously, I hosted a reusable container raffle throughout the week of our symposium to encourage limited waste initiatives. The raffle incentivized students who attended our symposium events to bring their own reusable container and utensils for eating the catered food. Students who attended the most events with their own containers were then eligible for monetary prizes as a reward. The response to this raffle event was overwhelming and students took the initiative far beyond the symposium events. Subsequently we have now seen many clubs on the PennVet campus employing these reusable container initiatives in their events. It has been extremely rewarding to see my peers excitedly come up to me daily to show me their Tupperware containers that they brought to a lunch or dinner talk. My hope is that events like these continue to exist and become the status quo on our campus in the future.