By Katie Hanson ’25
Until 2 p.m. today, Bowling Green will be buzzing with students, staff, and community members visiting student and department-run booths. The Earth Day festivities will mark the tenth annual Sustainability Fair, a Scripps College event centered around students but open to the public. This year’s fair also falls on Admitted Students Day.
Lauren Ng, Scripps’ sustainability coordinator, has been designing and planning the event for months. She says the fair is focused on educating and bringing people together.
“The purpose is to create community around different topics of sustainability and also infuse some fun and excitement around it,” Ng says. “It’s just a great way to strengthen ties and connections that may have been lost in the pandemic.”
The large collection of booths will include Scripps student clubs and organizations (CLORGs), such as the Scripps Student Garden in partnership with Pomona Farm, who will co-present on gardening. Scripps Scraps, an organization that collects unwanted belongings from students at the end of the spring semester and resells the items during fall move-in, hopes to use the fair to recruit new members.
Scripps faculty and staff members will also have booths. The Grounds Department will educate students on the more than 26 varieties of edible plants on campus, including olives, oranges, lemons, persimmons, and pomegranates, while the Facilities Department will highlight sustainability features in the College’s residence halls, such as low-flow fixtures, green cleaning, and efficient lighting. Tiernan Field House will bring its smoothie bike, which powers a blender when pedaled, and promote its Green Bikes Program, a bike rental and repair service. Ella Strong Denison Library employees will prepare an archival exhibit about the evolution of sustainability on campus, showcasing items such as agendas from student environmental club meetings in the 1940s.
Aside from the 20-plus booths, the fair will also hold a series of activities throughout the day, including a yoga class at noon, massages, and a jam-making session with fruits on campus. Students can enter a raffle by completing a bingo sheet while walking from booth to booth. The raffle prizes include sustainable goods—such as Rocketbook notebooks, Saalt menstrual cups, Food Huggers tupperware, Black Girl Sunscreen, Bee’s Wrap reusable food wrap, and Scripps College olive oil—as well as gift cards from local Claremont companies, such as I Like Pie, Cheese Cave, and Claremont Yoga.
Although the fair will be filled with fun programming from start to finish, Ng emphasizes the importance of different CLORGs and departments getting to know each other before the event even begins.
“Community is a really important part of sustainability,” Ng says. “We encouraged all the participants to come beforehand, talk to each other, and figure out how to share resources that will create pathways between the purposes of their groups.”