Vet Students Impacting Environmental Health - April Winner

Congrats to Sierra Bouchard from Cornell University for winning this last month's "Vet Students Impacting Environmental Health" challenge! Read below about her commitment to making SAVMA more sustainable!

"Last spring, when our SAVMA Symposium 2020 planning committee was looking for Symposium Chairs, I volunteered to assist in making the symposium more sustainable - and thus the SAVMA Symposium Sustainability Chair was born! By working alongside the other chairs as a sustainability advisor, I was able to suggest green alternatives to improve sustainability in five specific areas: accommodations and venues, transportation, food and beverage, material use, and merchandise. Some of our major accomplishments included composting for all meals, providing reusable dishware (no disposable cups, plates, or cutlery), working with vendors to provide reusable day trip containers for meals instead of single-use wrapped to-go lunches, local and sustainably sourced food, sustainable merchandise, digital event tickets and lecture materials, provided recommendations to attendees so that they too could be more sustainable throughout symposium, and much more! Though symposium was unfortunately cancelled, I know that my work will be used by future planning committees to provide sustainable symposia, and have already received positive feedback from our vendors about how their views on sustainability have changed, and the role it will play in planning other events. For example, by working with us on such a large-scale event, Cornell Catering is now confident that they can provide sustainable options for any event that they are hired for in the future by providing non-disposable options, improving composting availability, and sourcing their food and beverages from local and sustainable sources. Small individual changes have a ripple effect - resulting in improvements in environmental health over time!"