SOLEBURY ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION CLUB

Led an educational campaign (including strategically placing signage around campus) to remind students that Solebury is a plastic water bottle free campus.

Maintenance did the full campus LED conversion in August of 2021, which cut electricity consumption by 33%.  This reduced our carbon footprint on campus by 527,000 pounds of CO2 annually which is the equivalent of not driving 601,067 miles driven annually.

We planned a sustainability week this year (including a school-wide community event) and put in a rain garden and riparian buffer to counter the effects of severe flooding events (which are increasing due to climate change). We presented to senior administration, students, parents, facility, and maintenance. We got funding, wrote and got grants, and ordered signage. We consulted with master gardeners, master watershed stewards, coordinated with the local watershed, and more. For more, go here! 

We've implemented Minimal Meat Fridays in an effort to introduce students to healthy vegetarian food and show community members that changing your diet to consume less meat is a viable way of fighting climate change.

We've given information presentations to the school regarding food waste and sustainability in an effort to boost awareness about environmental sustainability in the student and staff body. 

Solebury School composts leaves, clippings, wood chips, and food from the kitchen. The compost is turned weekly and used in various gardens around campus and by the beautification committee when planting flowers. 

Solebury School maintains a vegetable and pollinator garden, which is used primarily as a teaching tool for the Science department. Produce from the garden is used by the dining hall and on-campus faculty. 

SEAC partnered with Call2Recycle to allow Solebury community members (including the IT department) to recycling most batteries and even cellphones.

Providing a riparian buffer along the Primrose creek to reduce run-off and support biodiversity in the stream bed and surrounding wetlands

We've purchased clearly labeled large bins as "Landfill" or "Recycle" and strategically placed them on campus to increase recycling 

An ongoing effort of replacing water fountains with "hydration stations" that have filtration systems and easy fill spouts for reusable water bottles

We've printed and strategically placed signage around campus reminding students and staff to use reusable water bottles and to be mindful of their food wastage and make better choices.

We've held a fundraiser to buy re-usable mugs for the dining hall so that school dining services could reduce the number of single-use paper and Styrofoam cups that were used.

We've created a web page on sustainability and how the school is embracing sustainable practices and encouraged administrators to put it up on the school's website. Solebury's sustainability web page can be viewed here.

We lobbied the senior administration to adopt a Solebury School sustainability vision statement which can be found on the sustainability webpage.

SEAC met with our trash hauler to make our recycling system more efficient by determining what exactly can and can't be recycled (a surprisingly complicated task)! We then worked with the school's director of finance to re-negotiate our waste contract to make it more eco-friendly!

Last April (2021) SEAC held a Sustainability week (similar to Solebury's STEM week) that centered on educating the Solebury school on how to recycle properly and ways to be more sustainable (such as by ditching single-use plastic bottles, by using TerraCycle to recycle hard-to-recycle plastics, and by composting our lunch containers). We hosted different speakers from an expert on Passive House design and a climate and energy NPR reporter to an environmental lobbyist and a representative from the Conservation Voters of PA. See the full schedule here. 

Began composting food scraps from students in a rotating composter behind the Dining Hall. SEAC students manage and run the entire composting process!