AWESC Environmental Tip of the Month!

CSU Presents: Animal Health Advocates in a Changing Climate

Colorado State University's One Health Club is excited to present Animal Health Advocates in a Changing Climate - a virtual symposium on climate change and health for the veterinary profession! This symposium is designed to begin equipping clinicians, technicians and students with knowledge and tools to be effective contributors in protecting animal health in a changing climate. From an interdisciplinary One Health perspective, climate change as it relates to animal health will be explored through the lens of emerging disease, conservation implications, emergency management, veterinary care, and sustainable business initiatives. Attendees can engage with top scientists, advocates, and veterinarians leading the charge towards a healthier future for our planet and learn about actions needed to join the force. We are currently accepting registrations, which is FREE for students! Please check out our website for program details, speaker information, registration and more! Make sure to check out the Student Showcase and consider submitting an abstract if you (or your student club/group) have created movement towards a healthy and sustainable future. 

CSU SAVMA Presents Dash for Trash

Colorado State University is promoting both physical and environmental health through their Dash for Trash event!  Check out their infographic for details and information on how to win a giftcard!

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!"

Vet Students Impacting Environmental Health - March Winner

Stephanie Schiavone from Colorado State explains what she does to help with environmental sustainability at her school and within the teaching hospital at CSU!

I am the lead student on a research project that focuses on environmental sustainability in a veterinary teaching hospital. We designed and sent out a survey to every AVMA accredited veterinary school with an associated teaching hospital on environmental sustainability in the workplace. The survey is designed to target all employees and students who are undergoing clinical rotations. Our purpose for designing this survey was in response to a different survey that was sent out to veterinary students on sustainability in their curriculum, which found that students wanted to learn more about the health of the planet. We wanted to target the employees and 4th year DVM students in clinical rotations to further understand how sustainability was being handled from the perspective of the people who spent the most time at the workplace. Our goals for this project are to discover where within the hospital there was a lot of non-sustainable waste being produced and how to better address it to see where changes can be made. Examples of some of the questions we asked include “How high of a priority should environmental sustainability be?” and “Select the top three areas you would be interested in helping to reduce the environmental footprint at your veterinary hospital”. Our hope with this study is to publish it to JVME so that we can start to make more sustainable changes in our hospitals and design a better future for ourselves and all other living beings on earth.