Students hit the streets
It was a chilly morning on Nov. 9, but Mark Shifflet, senator of the College of Education and Human Services, as well as other SU students and senate members, took to the streets and held the first “Street Clean-up and Electronics Drive” at the corner of Fort and Earl streets.
The clean-up was intended to establish a fall service project within the Shippensburg community, while bringing together the community and university by recycling old and new electronics.
Everything that is gathered at the drive will be recycled by the same group that does the recycling on campus. Shifflet was able to work this out with the help from the information technology people on campus, “specifically Greg Day,” he said, who made it possible to take the electronics from town and use the same recycling as the university.“This is a good cooperation between the university and town,” Shifflet said.
By taking the town’s recyclable trash and electronics, Shifflet and company are providing a service to the community by doing all of this free of charge and in an environmentally efficient way.
“There is really only one place around here that takes televisions, especially any kind of monitors, and it’s down in Blue Ridge Summit. It would cost them money most times to have it picked up by the borough or the townships, so what we’re doing here is just providing basically a free option for the town to get rid of their stuff,” Shifflet said.
Arriving at 9 a.m. to set up shop at the corner of Fort and Earl streets by Pizza Man, and with the event not beginning until 10 a.m., Shifflet already had community members dropping off recyclables, televisions and monitors.
By 10:30 a.m., there was a nice sized grouping of flat screens and monitors in the parking lot waiting to be handled by student workers and hauled away.
Shifflet believes much of his manpower for the project came from Greek life and additional clubs, “which we’re very thankful for,” he said.
In addition to emails sent out to students of the university, community members were contacted and made aware of the event by flyers that were advertised throughout various places in town, advertisement in the Shippensburg News-Chronicle and announcements at various churches and community organizations — such as the American Legion.
Shifflet also advertised the event at his church and said he was pleased with the turn out that morning.
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