Members of the University of Alabama Business Honors Program’s Clean Energy Team hosted the third annual UA Sustainability Day Tuesday. The event took place across the University of Alabama and highlighted programs currently in place on campus helping to promote sustainability.

Team members set up tables and presentations at several locations across campus and handed out fliers about the positive effects sustainable programs are having on campus. The students involved also passed out stickers, highlighters and even snow cones to students and faculty who stopped to see one of their venues.

Caroline Murray was one of the Clean Energy Team members responsible for organizing this year’s event.

“Sustainability Day is all about promoting to students the sustainable practices already in place on campus,” Murray said. “We’re not out to try to make you a vegan, we just want to show you how easy and beneficial it is to make green choices.”

Senior class members of the Business Honors Program parked a natural gas vehicle in front of Morgan Hall for the event. The vehicle, a vibrantly colored Honda Civic, was acquired for last year’s event to showcase the benefits utilizing natural gas has over burning traditional fossil fuels.  Fact sheets distributed by the students outlined many of these benefits including significantly lower carbon emissions, longer vehicle lives and greater domestic availability.

The Clean Energy Team also hosted Bob Strickland, the manager of natural gas transportation at Alagasco, for a speaking event at Alston Hall. A major supporter of clean energy, Strickland serves on several natural gas organizations, including NGVAmerica and the Alabama Clean Fuels Coalition.

“I wholeheartedly believe in running our country’s vehicles on natural gas for the well-being of our citizens,” Strickland said in a recent interview for Alagasco. “We need to find ways to reduce our addiction to foreign oil and use our own natural resources in order to ensure energy security for our country.” Strickland emphasized in his presentation six benefits that the use of natural gas in vehicles has over gasoline including being cleaner, safer, more affordable, domestically produced, more abundant and more reliable.

Bama Dining also hosted a presentation for the event yesterday at Lakeside Dining Hall. Known as the Clean Your Plate campaign, employees weighed the amount of discarded food from each diner’s tray and recorded the results, demonstrating the amount of food often wasted by students in “all-you-can-eat” style dining halls.