STARKVILLE — As part of today’s observance of 2016 National Earth Day, a group of Mississippi State University students will unveil four new campus bicycle-repair stations.
With support provided through the university’s Green Fund program, members of Students for a Sustainable Campus and some landscape architecture majors recently equipped each of the locations with an air pump and assorted wrenches and other tools.
Also today, SSC held a 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Earth Day Fair on the Colvard Union Plaza. As part of that event, a repair station was displayed as members demonstrate its use.
Junior Abbey K. Wallace, a landscape architecture major from Madison, developed the project with three classmates: senior landscape contracting major Preston S. Sorrell of Chelsea, Alabama; and landscape architecture graduate students Michael P. Keating and Amer Mahadin of Starkville.
Their proposal had been submitted in competition sponsored by Green Fund, the environmental sustainability initiative of MSU’s facilities management department. For more, visit fm.msstate.edu/news/green-fund.
David Hoffman, SSC faculty adviser, said the Green Fund was created to raise funds for student-organized projects like this.
“The vision of the Green Fund is to have students work across colleges and with faculty on projects that help improve our sustainability,” the associate professor of cultural anthropology explained.
Senior Anna Claire Rogers of Hunstville, Alabama, is an agronomy major currently serving as SSC president. The organization received proposals ranging from composting projects to creation of a developed area to accommodate beach volleyball, she said.
“We felt like the bicycle repair stations would serve the most people,” Rogers said in noting that “the ones we already have on campus are well worn.”
Joining those already in place near campus residence halls, the new stations will be located adjacent to the Fresh Food Company dining facility, Colvard Union, and Sanderson and Hunter Henry centers.
According to Hoffman, existing stations “aren’t in areas where there is a lot of public bicycling right now, but breakdowns on bikes happen all the time, all over campus.”
For complete information on the landscape architecture and landscape contracting academic programs in MSU’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, see lalc.msstate.edu.
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