Oregon Daily Emerald

UO holds conference on sustainability

Four-day-long HOPES event, run entirely by UO students, addresses issues of conservation

View video from the event!

With the enthusiasm of high school prom attendees, students compared outfits, added final touches and decided who looked the trashiest - the highest compliment of the night.

The Trashy Fashion Show and Party on Saturday celebrated another year for the Holistic Options for Planet Earth Sustainability conference , a four day-long event run entirely by University students.

The event is the only student-run conference of its kind in the United States. This year the conference drew more than 300 students, practitioners and community members from all over the country, including states such as North Dakota, Colorado and even New York.

For the 15 students and community members who made their runway outfits from refuse and other donated items during workshops on Saturday, the light-hearted nature of the show was a welcome departure from the academically rigorous workshops, speeches and discussions.

Plastic trash bags were crocheted into dresses, shower curtains were transformed into translucent skirts, and bicycle inner tubes were stretched into tube-tops.

Most agreed the hottest material of the evening, featured in almost every ensemble, was a shiny green foil from old potato chip bags.

"The most popular item this year was the potato chip bags," said Eilidh Maclean, the Trashy Fashion Show coordinator. "The company, Spiral Spuds, went out of business and donated the rolls of the bags to Bring Recycling here in Eugene. That's where we got a lot of the stuff for this."

The only connection between the costumed festivities and the conference's academic water theme, "Confluence: Where Water Meets Design," was the rain-drenched participants dancing in the courtyard outside Lawrence Hall.

Attendees at other conference events addressed issues from storm water management and water conservation to maintaining safe drinking water supplies.

For those University students who are part of the Ecological Design Center, the goal of the summit is to promote understanding and application of sustainable design principles in architecture.

Continued...

Page 1 of 3 next >