By: Emily Larking
For my outreach project, I worked on the tailgating project to help clean up the campus after home football games. Our group examined areas of the campus before and after home football games to see what trash was left behind. It was important to examine the before and after to ensure that the tailgating was responsible for the trash we found and is important to examine in similar research. We discovered through our cleanup on Sunday that, although tailgating did result in a lot of trash, UGA does a great job of making sure it is cleaned up early the next day.
Many people don’t usually think about the impacts of the trash left behind from tailgating and only that it is a fun pre-game activity. This project was intellectually stimulating because although the clean up crew does a good job, there is still evidence of trash left behind if you look hard enough. It’s relevant to UGA students because we all go to school here and many of us live here so we should want to take care of our campus. Our group had to get creative when searching for trash such as heading down into the creek to grab a can.
I assumed campus would be a mess the Sunday after tailgating but in reality, searching for trash was more difficult than I would’ve thought. I discovered areas where trash was most likely to be such as around stairs or near the creek. We knew that our audience were UGA students, many of whom were likely to attend home football games. We want students to know that although it may appear spotless on campus on Sundays, if you look more closely there is trash that can still harm the environment.
I would probably have chosen an earlier game and had the cleanup afterword if I did it differently. Also I may have chosen to search around Tate for trash. It related to the environmental aspects of our class, such as water quality. Pollution negatively impacts this water quality. I learned that although an environment may appear to be spotless, pollution can be found where humans have been. This assignment was effective in helping to show me that UGA does have an issue with pollution in our creeks and other areas.