On Feb. 11, in forty-degree weather, Environmental club members performed a roadside clean-up at the Pomona and Jimmie Leeds Road intersection, as well as Zurich Ave. Elyse Forcier, Vice President and Community Service chair of the club organized the clean-up and adjusted it as it came with some challenges.

Benjamin Dziobek founded the club back in 2019 and has dedicated his years at Stockton to making the area more sustainable in the Pinelands. In the Spring of 2020, Dziobek helped write a proposal to ban single-use containers and urged Stockton and Chartwells to adopt the use of biodegradables, which are currently used in today’s food courts.

Two years ago, Dziobek entrusted Forcier with the Community Service clean-up tasks, which have been largely successful. Forcier remarked, “I am trying to get it more organized in terms of getting everyone service hours, transportation, a [consisted schedule]…one problem that I am running into is that the roads don’t get as dirty as quickly as we clean them up, so we have to find more and more roads…We have a section of a road that at some point the club adopted…that’s what I wanted to start today, but we did that last October…and it’s not that dirty…but it’s a good starting point of where we clean up first.”

After organizing several Roadside clean-ups, Forcier saw members returning and mentioned that “someone had commented being away from their phones and being outside and actually look around and notice the trash but also the clouds, plants, and nature…That’s just a goal of mine, that once [people] do it once that realize that this is easy and it’s nice to be outside…It’s aimless, you’re just outside for two hours and then you’re done, it’s not that much manual labor…You just have to take the first step.”

It seems the Stockton University Environmental Club is taking steps in the right direction to help the environment with dedicated leaders as its guide.