With approximately 15,000 chicken wings and about 1,500 college students in the same place at the same time, things were bound to get messy and wasteful.
The Interfraternity Council led its sixth annual Chicken Wing Charity Thing on Thursday, and it became the first student group to work with the UF Office of Sustainability to incorporate composting at such a large-scale event.
Ryan Wolis, director of special projects for the IFC and a 21-year-old UF political science junior, worked with Greeks Going Green to make the event — an unlimited-chicken-wing dinner fundraiser for Dance Marathon — certified sustainable for the first time.
The UF Office of Sustainability’s sustainable event certification program gives tips and tricks to plan events with minimal impact on the environment, said Allison Vitt, outreach and communications coordinator for the Office of Sustainability.
“It’s a pretty good guide that really offers a lot of different resources to get people thinking a little bit about things that they might not think of off the top of their head when they’re planning for an event,” Vitt said.
Vitt said the three levels of certification are orange, blue and green, and they are determined by the number of efforts found under each category on the checklist. IFC earned a green level for the event, the highest level of recognition.
One of the many sustainable practices was the three-option waste section at the Chicken Wing Charity Thing, with a compost bin, a recycling bin and a landfill bin. This makes it easy and convenient for participants to send less waste to landfills. There were specific volunteers at the waste section to direct people to the right bin.
Wolis said he wanted to make the event sustainable because he remembered all the trash left behind while on cleanup duty for the last two years.
“It was pretty successful,” he said. “The amount of trash we had on the ground was minuscule compared to last year.”
Vitt said organizations must reach an average of four efforts under each category to earn a green certification rating.
“They hit a lot of those different points and really tried to think about different ways that they could incorporate sustainability into their event,” she said.
[A version of this story ran on page 4 on 3/17/2015 under the headline “Annual chicken-wing event sustainable for the first time”]
