Northeastern hosted its first-ever Sustainability Innovation Week March 10-14, bringing students and faculty together to address looming environmental challenges. The five-day event consisted of lectures, workshops, competitions and more, allowing students to learn from experts — and one another — how to live more sustainably on campus. 

Sustainability Innovation Week is new to Northeastern and was coordinated by the school’s Climate Justice Hub this year to bring student voices to the forefront of pressing environmental concerns. Interactive activities spanned Northeastern’s campuses, including events in Oakland and Seattle. 

Sustainability innovation is a broad term that encourages systemic progress toward the Earth’s ability to provide for future generations, said Orla Molloy, a fourth-year environmental studies and political science combined major and co-chair of the Student Sustainability Committee at Northeastern. 

“Anyone and everyone is allowed to participate in Sustainability Innovation Week, so you’re seeing people from engineering, you’re seeing people from [College of Social Sciences and Humanities], you’re seeing people from [College of Arts, Media and Design] being involved in this,” Molloy said. “I think it’ll be a really, really, really cool opportunity for cross-sector and cross-study engagement.”

Many Northeastern students care about their environmental impact, with over 20 student groups on campus dedicated to minimizing environmental harm. Sustainability Innovation Week is a means of learning and communicating their ideas to faculty and peers. 

In between classes, students and faculty were encouraged to stop by Curry Student Center to listen to keynote speaker Amy Luer, senior global director of sustainability and innovation at Microsoft, or check out the reusable home parked on Centennial Common, built by two Northeastern alumni out of a box truck.

“I’m looking forward to the expo; I’ve been walking around for a while, and I’ve noticed some really, really cool ideas,” said Mariam Hamzat, a marine and environmental sciences doctoral student. “Northeastern students are really, really awesome. People have very interesting ideas.”

With an increasingly unstable environmental future, Sustainability Innovation Week aims to create and implement small, actionable steps people can take on campus to make a difference. 

“It’s very salient for institutions with referent power to be able to influence how ideas turn into action, especially when it comes to very powerful issues like the environment that affect people on a day-to-day basis,” Molloy said.

Part of the week included a competition between students from Northeastern campuses across the country who submitted their campus sustainability initiatives for judging. Ideas ranged from an app that tracks personal emissions to an e-waste recycling hub. Sustainabites, a strategy to reduce food waste in Northeastern dining halls, was declared the winner by the panel of judges March 11.

The main idea behind Sustainabites is to allow students to sample food before a large helping is put on their plates. The goal is to cut down on the immense food waste in Northeastern dining halls and create a simple way for everyone to live more sustainably. 

“Our idea is pretty easy, it’s very low cost and very effective,” said Tammy Ibeama, a second-year master’s student in business and a member of the winning team, Sustainabites. “We want to support Northeastern in any way we can by either training the staff or being involved in the implementation of the ideas.”

As the Sustainable Campus Innovation Competition winner, Sustainabites was featured throughout the week and earned the title of Sustainability Innovation Champion.

“My next step is trying to get more people to know about sustainability because one big thing is awareness; we want to get people engaged in the process,” Ibeama said. “We also want to collaborate with some of the sustainability clubs on campus to drive this initiative across all students in all levels.” 

Student voices are essential to preserving the Earth. Northeastern students have a lot at stake in the planet’s future and feel compelled to participate in campus organizations like Composting at Northeastern University and the Husky Environmental Action Team. Sustainability Innovation Week serves as a platform for emotions, ideas and questions to run rampant. 

“We are the future; we are the now, so it’s very, very important that students are considered, especially when decisions are being made, when discussions are going on, students need to sit at the table,” Hamzat said. “They need to be part of the discussion. Students and youths are generally very important.”

Students aren’t the only people involved in Sustainability Innovation Week. Megan Curtis-Murphy, a Climate Justice Hub staff member, created a panel March 10 addressing large-scale plastic pollution. Representatives from local community groups like Alternatives for Community and Environment, Reclaim Roxbury and One Square World attended Sustainability Innovation Week to strengthen climate action through research partnerships.

“We are a big research institution, and I think we drive a lot of people who have innovative ideas, so it’s surprising to me that we didn’t already have a program like this for our students and various groups to be able to channel their ideas into a week of projects,” Molloy said. 

Sustainability as a concept has grown exponentially on Northeastern’s campus. Molloy recalls each year returning to a larger and larger Student Sustainability Committee. Sustainability Innovation Week reflects the increased desire on campus to talk about and address environmental challenges. 

“We are seeing increased opportunities to be able to talk about sustainability at an institution like Northeastern, and so I think one of the greatest goals from this week is that we’ll have been able to bring together people, ideas, resources, to more holistically look at these problems when it comes to sustainability challenges and be able to talk about how we can actually broaden our coalition and come together to address them,” Molloy said.