Each year, incoming Georgia Tech students participate in a first-year reading program called Project One. This year, all first-year students have received a copy of Edward Humes’s Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash.

As the key text for Project One this year, Garbology provides our central thematic focus for our events, programming, and discussion, and seeks to support Tech’s new QEP, Serve-Learn-Sustain. Project One will explore, investigate, and interrogate the intersectionality between waste, privilege, social justice, and power, in order to create a more sustainable campus and community.

In addition to using the book in their GT 1000 and ENGL 1101/1102 classes, students will have the opportunity to participate in a number of Garbology-related events on campus. Some of our events for this Fall include:

Edward Humes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Garbology, visited Georgia Techon October 1 to talk trash with GT students, faculty, and staff. Humes spoke to the campus community about sustainability, consumer waste, and how we have the power to change our trajectory of environmental and economic harm by taking advantage of the opportunities our trash has to offer.

The 4.33@Tech podcast follows the trash at Tech as they explore the Game Day Recycling program in their second episode, “Smells Like School Spirit.”

The Sustainable Initiatives for the Renewed Georgia Tech Library Panel explores the library renewal and redesign, discussing the sustainability initiatives that were part of the design process and the renewal’s connection to the campus sustainability plan. The panel will be held on Tuesday, October 6, at 6 p.m. in Clough 102.

Dr. Annalisa Bracco, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, will discuss the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the dangerous phenomenon of ocean pollution by plastic debris. The lecture will be held on Tuesday, November 10, at 7 p.m. in Clough 144.

For more information about Project One, visit http://enrichment.gatech.edu/project-one