Students Katherine Harris (left) and Anna Podgornyak sell reusable bags in front of McKeldin Library as part of a class project.
Students sold reusable canvas bags in front of McKeldin Library on Thursday as part of a yearlong project applying business principles to a social issue.
Katherine Harris, along with two classmates in the business school’s Social Innovation Fellows program, sold 23 reusable bags for $3 each within a two-hour period.
“We’re basically just trying to get everybody to ban the bag,” said Harris, a sophomore supply chain management and marketing major. “They could be recycled; it’s adding unnecessary objects to trash and landfills, which are already taking up so much space in the environment that they shouldn’t be.”
The group’s idea to sell reusable bags came from the University of Maryland’s switch to single-stream recycling, Harris said. While the state recycles plastic bags, this university does not recycle them for financial reasons. Many plastic bags end up in landfills as a result.
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According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans generated about 33 million tons of plastic in 2013 but only recycled about 9 percent of that plastic.
“You can just imagine the amount of plastic bags students use every day, whether they’re buying something at [the Cambridge Community Center convenience store] or Target or getting something to go from the diner,” Harris said.
The students also began to collect plastic bags in their efforts to “ban the bag.” The team plans to donate collected bags to the university’s Sigma Kappa sorority chapter, which uses plastic bags to create sleeping mats that they donate to the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C.
“It takes a lot of bags, which takes a lot of yarn, which takes a lot of manpower,” said Alex Kramer, a junior environmental science and policy major. “Our biggest problem is finding volunteers.”
The sale was part of an assignment for BMGT468V: Special Topics in Management and Organization; Transformative Action: Effective Methods for Social Change to experiment with a pop-up social enterprise for two hours, Harris said, as part of a larger entrepreneurship project.
“As much interest as there is in entrepreneurship, the social component, figuring out how entrepreneurs can actually help make the world a better place, is a real point of leverage,” said David Kirsch, director of the Social Innovation Fellows program.
The fellows program is in its sixth year, said Kirsch, who teaches the transformative action class. The class consists of five teams, each attempting to use business techniques to address a social issue, such as sustainability.
Fellows in the program take two classes over the course of a year, culminating in a large project that requires the students to either create a business model or partner with an existing business to address their specific issue.
These students are not alone in their efforts to increase sustainability at this university, though. The Princeton Review recently named this university to its 2016 Green College Honor Roll, citing recycling habits on the campus and the popular sustainability minor.
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“We were put together as a group of three because we all care about the environment,” Harris said. “We’re going to take it a little bit further in each step.”
