Student News

Students Lead Environmental Health Initiatives on Campus

MPH students Samantha Hall and Andrew Dey are the SPH representatives for the BUMC Climate Action Group, which aims to engage the community in environmental advocacy through a variety of climate initiatives.

Master of Public Health students Samantha Hall and Andrew Dey are leading environmental and climate health initiatives on the Boston University Medical Campus (BUMC) through the BUMC Climate Action Group.

Made up of students, staff, and faculty from the Schools of Public Health, Medicine, and Graduate Medical Sciences, the Climate Action Group works to improve campus sustainability efforts and educate the BUMC community about the impacts of climate change on health. The group centers their work around four mission-driven initiatives: advocacy and community engagement, waste management, sustainability, and environmental justice. Each initiative is headed by one student leader.

Hall, a second-year environmental health student studying the intersection of environmental health and infectious disease, leads the group’s environmental justice initiative, where she has partnered with BU Sustainability and the Boston University Student Government to help organize an environmental justice seminar series. “Over the last year, we have been grateful to host several community organizers and leaders to share about their environmental justice work in and around Boston,” she says.

With over 100 people registering per event, the seminars have covered a range of topics, including an introduction to environmental justice, food justice, and student leadership and engagement in the Boston area. “These seminars are a great opportunity to continue the conversation around justice, especially in our communities,” says Hall. “It has been powerful to hear from those deeply engaged in environmental justice work, and we hope these seminars encourage attendees to get involved in environmental justice activism, as well.”

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dey, a second-year epidemiology and biostatistics student with an interest in environmental epidemiology, led the Climate Action Group’s initiative on waste management, which focused on reducing physical waste on and around campus.

Now, as masks have become a daily necessity to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, Dey is leading a mask cleanup project. “The mask waste on campus is an unfortunate and growing problem,” he says. “We really want to encourage people to actually throw their masks away instead of just litter them.”

Through a grant from BU Sustainability, the group will be putting out signs around BUMC and wrapping trash bins across campus with messaging that encourages people to properly dispose of their masks and educates them on the harms that littered masks can have on the environment and animals. Dey says the group is also currently in discussion with BU Facilities to negotiate for some trash bins to be moved into heavily littered areas to help control both mask waste and general waste.

Additional projects from the Climate Action Group include advocating for compost facilities in BUMC residence buildings, enforcing proper recycling and composting practices on campus, decreasing food waste on campus, and reducing plastic water bottles at campus events.

Dey says that working with the Climate Action Group has been “a great way to see how effective a very small, eager group of people can be in actively changing things for the better.”