On Saturday, the Residence Hall Association will host a Big Paper Airplane Tournament, one of its sustainability-focused events for this year. Teams will create airplanes using only recycled paper.
The event was inspired by an episode of The Office titled, “Paper Airplane," which features an office-wide paper airplane competition with a grand prize.
“When I saw that, I was thinking like ‘Hey, that seems pretty fun,' and then I got this idea that we could get people just to use recycled pieces of paper as their paper airplane and it would be a lot of fun and a very simple idea,” said Andy Hoang, RHA director of sustainable projects. “And that’s pretty much where it came from.”
Hoang said this event will encourage student involvement in sustainability on campus.
“At RHA, we’re always on a mission to look for innovative and creative and, of course, fun ways to engage our residents,” Hoang said. “And when it comes to my position with sustainable projects, when you want to get people excited about sustainability, you have to be really creative because it’s not really a subject that gets a lot of people really excited. It’s not really out there yet, so you have to find different ways to get people involved and the paper airplane tournament is one way to do that.”
Cara Kuuskvere, a sustainability officer for Hinton James, spoke about the presence of sustainability-focused groups at the event. Participants will be able to interact with and learn from various environmental groups on campus.
“So, there will be a few groups, environmental groups at the event, like the Three Zeros Initiative and the Green Games,” Kuuskvere said. “They’ll have tables to educate students about some of our environmental initiatives on campus and there’ll be a bunch of fun giveaways.”
Senior Bharat Modi, president of RHA, emphasized the education component of the Big Paper Airplane Tournament.
“I think also sometimes there’s not necessarily a stigma associated around living sustainably, but a perception that it’s difficult or it requires a lot of radical lifestyle changes,” Modi said. “And I think this is something that demonstrates that there are very simple ways to do it too and hopefully this will help them generate some of those ideas on their own, too.”
