Reflection

Reflection

When I moved to Oakland in the second semester of freshman year, my family and I had all the essentials in our new house but not many things to make it feel like a home. Then, as I began walking my dog around the neighborhood, I started noticing piles and piles of free items that neighbors would toss out. A lot of those curbside treasures could still be used and were really valuable. I started picking up those items to furnish my home, hence the term “stooping” and wanted to do something about this persistent issue. It pained me to see all these really nice items dumped and sent to the landfill, rather than going to families who wanted them. Here was my firsthand experience with consumerism and thus, climate change. Consumerism fuels climate change through the excessive pursuit of material gain at the cost of environmental degradation, pollution, and emissions. After a year of stooping and climate research, I decided to share my passion with my classmates. In junior year, I founded Stooping Club. Stooping Club first started off, as the name suggests, a school club for like minded students to go around the community and save useful items from the landfill. As we collected more items, I wanted to help more people reduce their landfill contributions. Then I thought to myself, what about a network of student-run Stooping Clubs at schools all over the world? That would be a perfect way to engage youth in sustainable entrepreneurship and effective action against climate change. Creating a website at collegeprepstooping.com was a logical next step to expand my initiative and take my club to the next level, a pending nonprofit business. The message I have for viewers of my website is to appreciate the value of your household items and reuse them. Our excessive consumption, or consumerism, is directly aggravating climate change. Each product means more emissions produced and more natural resources exploited at all steps of the process, be it manufacturing, packaging, transportation, or disposal. My vision is for there to be a Stooping Club branch in every community, especially high schools and colleges. Each branch will serve as a central hub for people to donate gently used household items and “shop” for the things they need. Inventory comes from still-usable, discarded items on the curb as well as the unwanted goods that community members no longer have space for. Collectively, we can keep useful items out of the landfill, reducing our obsession with new emissions-heavy products and the environmental harms of waste.