Behind Ms. Mueller’s classroom, among the Home Depot buckets, bottles of spray paint, and watering cans—fenced in by the burgundy color that spreads throughout campus—lies the meeting place of the PCDS Environmental Club. On Thursday, November 7th, 2024, the club met to make progress on their new garden beds.
Sarah Bendok, junior and Environmental Club Co-Leader, holding an electric drill in each hand, said, “For a couple of years now, I’ve been volunteering at community gardens, mainly in south Phoenix where there’s a huge healthy food scarcity problem. So I wanted to bring it here to PCDS so we can start being more sustainable.”
Having built a garden bed prototype after school on November 6th, the leaders were able to instruct people on how to align the wood planks, drill holes on either side, and insert screws to tie it all together.
While the garden beds are an exciting project, the club has more on the agenda. Sarah said, “We’re thinking of bringing hydroponics to PCDS. It’s basically these vertical gardens that don’t require soil, and you can grow more plants on those. So we’re hoping to build those in the near future and hopefully put them in areas where the student body can actually see them.”
The ultimate goal with the hydroponics is to grow a variety of things like flowers, vegetables, and lettuce, and they hope for it to be used in kitchens.
“We have to contact somebody at ASU to make sure it’s safe, but if it’s not being used in the kitchen, it can also be donated to food banks,” according to Sarah.
The Environmental Club is paving the way toward a sustainable future not only for our campus, but also for the world. While their efforts might seem inconsequential when thinking of climate change at large, much of the action to be taken is up to individuals, so consider your habits. Simply composting appropriate items in the designated bins on campus, being a mindful consumer of products, and reducing single-use plastics will contribute to a larger impact that benefits all of us.
