Sustainability Week brings Ithaca College and the greater Tompkins County community together to promote sustainable practices and learn how to incorporate them into daily life. The event supports Ithaca College’s goal to be carbon neutral by 2050.
The Ithaca College Sustainability Week Committee, made up of students and faculty across majors, organizes events throughout the week where students can learn about sustainability, meet with members of the community and present their own initiatives or projects on sustainability.
Olivia Wood, senior Documentaries Studies and Productions major, was selected as a film panelist for Sustainability Week 2025 for a documentary she produced and co-directed, “When I’m in the Water.”
“The colloquium is a great example of how environmental sustainability can be centered in all of our different schools,” Wood said.
Sustainability Week is one of few multidisciplinary events that is organized and attended by all students at Ithaca College. Collaboration between different schools is necessary for this to be possible.
“As a park student, I think we need more of this sentiment throughout our school because sustainability isn’t just a focus, it affects everyone and everything,” Wood added.
Campus-wide collaboration
Associate Professor of Management in the School of Business and co-chair of the Sustainability Week Committee, Christine Bataille, said the week-long event emerged from a Leadership and Collaboration course she taught in 2017.
“The students came up with a beautiful plan, and together we talked about creating the sustainability committee,” Bataille said. “The only problem at this point was that the faculty and the students were all in the School of Business.”
The sustainability committee currently works with many of the schools at Ithaca College, and more than 15 local businesses and organizations committed to sustainable practices to engage as many students as possible throughout sustainability week.
Some of these events include a Demonstration Day for students to pitch sustainable business practices to potential investors, a sustainability-focused musical composition performed by students at the Whalen Symposium and a film event and panel for film students.
Bataille said that promoting sustainable practices within every school at Ithaca College is a priority for the committee every year, and that they are always looking for new ways to get more of the school and community involved.
“It’s not just about the School of Business, and it’s not just about Ithaca College, it’s about all of us together,” Bataille said. “I think certainly in my department, in our school and across campus this idea of Ithaca College having an impact on the local community and building those partnerships is so important and I think this is one way that we can do it really effectively.”
A community effort
Throughout Sustainability Week keynote speakers and panelists from the community, pop-up shops on campus and a sustainability fair for businesses to promote their sustainable practices brought the community and campus together.
The Tompkins County Department of Recycling and Materials Management is one of the local organizations the sustainability committee collaborated with to make Sustainability Week possible.
Wren Kingsley, assistant recycling specialist, said the Tompkins County Department of Recycling and Materials Management works with Ithaca College because “there is a huge network of stakeholders that are all really dedicated to making positive changes and students will then carry that experience and those operations into their future jobs,” she said.
Some of these initiatives include redirecting food waste from dining halls, maintaining composting centers for student waste and providing educational resources on sustainability.
“Ithaca College self-hauls all their material, they make all of the rules and regulations and they have the student population to support all of the changes that they want to see implemented into the system,” Kingsley said.
Kingsley said the collaboration between the Tompkins County Department of Recycling and Materials Management and Ithaca College is made possible with funding through grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
To learn more about the ways you can promote sustainability on and off campus, log on here.
