After pressuring UNC to pledge to end using coal by May 2020, the UNC Sierra Student Coalition is continuing to educate students about the impact of coal on the environment.
The coalition, UNC’s chapter of the national Sierra Club, teamed with Appalachian Voices to present an information session Tuesday night on the effects of coal on water sources. About 25 people attended.
“Water is crucial. Big coal is trying to dismantle the laws that keep this crucial resource clean,” said Sandra Diaz, Appalachian Voices’ North Carolina campaign coordinator, which is a nonprofit environmental group that focuses on the impact of coal in the southern Appalachian region.
Diaz brought the issue close to home by showing the process of extracting and processing coal at the L.V. Sutton Power Station in Wilmington through Google Earth animations.
“Coal is going away and (the industry) has to use more and more destructive techniques to get to it,” she said.
The main danger Diaz highlighted was the mountaintop removal method.
Diaz said the method blows the tops off of mountains using explosives. Companies then legally dump the leftover rubble into valleys, where it can contaminate nearby bodies of water with substances such as mercury.
The Sierra Student Coalition has been trying to highlight the dangers of these methods to UNC through its Beyond Coal campaign, which is trying to require the University to no longer invest endowment funds in coal companies.
The coalition has collected around 2,400 student signatures on a petition and hopes to get 4,000 by the end of the semester, said freshman Jasmine Ruddy, the petition coordinator.
