 Hi, my name's Ashley Sullivan and I'm with the Rosalia Project and we are here on the Church Street Marketplace Celebrating Earth Day. Really every day should be Earth Day, but on this day around the world we have millions and billions of people supporting, loving, cleaning up and making this earth a little bit better and brighter. So this morning we started off down at the Lake Champlain Community Sailing Center with about 50 people from a variety of organizations, the Conservation Law Foundation, UVM, there are people of color outdoors and we organized a clean up where we have over 50 people, our biggest turnout ever and we picked up in about an hour a whole lot of trash. We have now brought the debris up to Church Street and we are doing a public sort where we are going through all the debris and separating it into categories and the reason that we do this is to have a greater understanding of what we're finding because that will help us drive solutions both locally here in Burlington but also connect that to national data and global data. The other cool thing about today is that we are using art as a tool to highlight and draw people in to educate them about the problem of marine debris in our environment. So along with the public sort today we have also been creating a marine debris sculpture with some of the debris that we picked up today and I would like you to introduce you to the artist, Annie Caswell, who helped us create it. Hi Annie. Hi Ashley. So the big question is why did we use art as a tool to talk about marine debris? Well I think art can have a big impact on people and just watching the public today picking up the trash and putting it in I believe that they're really thinking about I've heard some comments thinking about how what we spend and where we put it and about the plastics that we have in the world. We can make a big impact to artists and involving the public is even just a step further because we can educate them as well by doing the sort and talking to them about pollution. Yeah and I think that one of the things I'd like to highlight just about this event here on the marketplace is that you know we are giving people opportunities as individuals to come to have solutions on how they can impact the problem. But I think there's also organizations here that are working on bigger systemic changes like the modernization of the bottle bill. We have VPURC here and the Conservation Law Foundation talking about dock foam legislation. So this data is really important because it helps tell the story and it helps support action both on an individual level and at the community level. My name is Brian Forrest, I'm from Williston and one of the ways we're helping the planet is to keep our trees whole and our forest whole and to stop logging our trees. The trees are our greatest natural sequestration machine we have for for taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. We have to do two things one is to take excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The second thing is to stop putting carbon dioxide into it. So there's two prong approach here. We have legislatively we are working on a replacement for fossil fuels which is geothermal network geothermal where a university, a neighborhood, a project, a building could have a network geothermal heat source and cooling source so it works four seasons and replace fossil fuels with a clean energy source. Right now burning of any kind of plant based source whether it's coal, oil, gas, wood, chips and speaking about chips we have a McNeil plant here in Burlington which is the greatest single source of CO2 contamination in the state and we want to replace that with either shut it down or replace it with geothermal so that we can have a clean source not just a renewable source. Trees are renewable over a hundred year span but we have seven years to cut our carbon in the atmosphere in half and that's a huge chore for seven years. So one of the first things to do is stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere. We have working on a couple of other projects that's the thermal energy. This is a large hydropower. All the hydropower that is possible cleanly has already been tapped out. The largest source of our electric energy comes from Hydro-Quebec in Canada and they're always looking to expand that source which covers more vegetation mass, producing more methane in the atmosphere, taking away indigenous lands and disturbing tribal customs and the wildlife past. It's a bad source for clean energy. Hydro itself is clean but large hydro like Quebec is not clean. Vermont is the only state in New England that allows Hydro-Quebec to be considered a clean energy source and the same thing goes through with biomass. None of the other New England states allow biomass to be counted as a renewable energy source, a clean energy source. Biomass is what I said before and it is a plant based fuels. We can't burn anything anymore. We need to keep our old trees. 350 Vermont is an environmental organization started by Bill McKibbin, a middle-berry college professor and it stands for parts per million. 350 parts per million is the highest parts per million we can have of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to keep our planet cool because our planet gets heat from the sun and puts heat back in the space and above 350 parts per million it starts trapping that heat which is an ongoing and constantly elevating heating of the planet so we need to stop that. Right now we're 450 parts per million which hasn't been seen for more than 350 years. So 350 is the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So if you're interested in becoming involved I believe as I said earlier please go to our Facebook page or actually the 350vermont.org webpage will direct you to ways that you can sign up, send a message if you are interested in joining us at whatever level of interest and capacity you have we would welcome you. One thing I want to add is that 350 makes fact sheets for people to learn and Brian was showing you one of them so people can learn about the different issues and then be more effective in going in and talking to legislators. Also we have people who are members can kind of start their own project and one of the projects we have going is a cleanup of the Pine Street Barge Canal in Burlington that is a super fun site and has been poisoned by a coal gasification plant and a bunch of other industries and so that's a project people can get involved in and then working together with an organization that is trying to prevent logging on state lands. My name is Kitty Uphred Chase and I live in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont the beautiful country up there and I'm here in Burlington for the Earth Day Fest because I'm concerned about climate and the future of our planet for next generations and for all living creatures and I'm here because I recognize that humans are part of the earth and not separate from it. We belong to the earth, the earth doesn't belong to us. So I'm here with a group called Citizens Climate Lobby. It's a national advocacy organization for people who want to talk with their members of Congress and encourage them to take the action that we know needs to happen in order to address the climate crisis and that's especially to try and keep fossil fuels in the ground. So we're encouraging our members of Congress to enact a carbon fee and dividend and that means taxing polluters of carbon and using that money to send back to families all across the United States. Some other priorities of Citizens Climate Lobby are building electrification, healthy forests and permitting reform and I actually borrowed this idea from somebody else to create a climate anxiety counseling booth in the spirit of Lucy Van Pelt and Charlie Brown because I think we need to talk about it. So many people are concerned but they think other people are not but we are, we all are concerned and so we need to talk about it and talk about our fears and talk about what we can do to make a difference because I believe that action is the antidote to anxiety. Hi everybody, my name is Christina Erickson and I am the new executive director at Local Motion. We are a statewide organization based here in Burlington, Vermont and it is our mission to make it safe, fun and accessible for everybody to walk, bike and roll in the state. So we provide technical assistance to town committees or walk bike groups on how to make their roads safer and we can do pop up demonstrations with temporary bike lanes. We teach kids all over the state how to ride bikes safely and then we operate the beautiful and beloved ferry, bike ferry that runs across the cut in the causeway and that will be opening up at the end of the month of, of, end of May and we rent bicycles at our trailside center located down on the waterfront here in Burlington. So come on over, rent a bike, get out there and enjoy the season. Hey, my name is Sam Glicken and I'm here with Vermont Green Football Club. We are a local minor league soccer team based here in Burlington, Vermont. We have events in the summertime over at UVM's Virtue Field. We have 10 matches this summer. Tickets are on sale now at tickets.bermontgreenfc.com. We are built on an environmental justice mission so we try to embed environmental justice and environmental sustainability and social justice in all club operations as we build a local soccer team here. We recruit players from across the United States into our team. We're part of a developmental league called USLE2 and we really help these players get seen by professional clubs around the world as they chase their aspirations of becoming professional soccer players. We're really excited to be building this in Vermont for and with our communities and as our community partners that really help us make this all happen. So come out and support Vermont Green Football Club this summer. First match is May 26th over at Virtue Field and we'll have games running through mid-July. My name is Molly Feldman, M-O-L-L-Y-F-E-L-D-M-A-N and I'm the environmental associate at V-PURG. That's the Vermont Public Interest Research Group and V-PURG is the state's largest environmental and consumer protection advocacy organization. Our team of advocates works in Montpelier in the state house pushing for policies that promote clean air, clean water, democracy, consumer protection, protecting vermoners from toxic chemicals, etc. And we have grassroots power behind us, 50,000 vermoners and supporters who we've met over the years doing our door-to-door canvas operations. So I'm here today for two reasons. One is to recruit folks to do that door-to-door grassroots canvassing with us this summer so that we can mobilize vermoners and form them statewide and get a lot of people power behind these campaigns. We're going to be canvassing on making big oil pay for the cost of climate change. They made the mess. They should help pay to clean it up. And in 2021 we had our canvas on the bottle bill. These were our t-shirts that we used. The bottle bill is Vermont's most successful recycling program. It's that five-cent deposit that you get back when you return. You are carbonated drinks and your beer. It's really good at turning bottles into bottles and cans into cans, but it hasn't been meaningfully updated in 50 years since we first passed it in 1972. Now we have water bottles and Gatorade and sports drinks and juice and wine and tea and all these other containers that unfortunately often get land-filled when we throw them in our single stream blue bins. So we have a bill, H-158, that just passed in the house a couple weeks ago and now it's moving through the Senate. And this bill would make important updates to the bottle bill program and expand the scope to cover all those beverage containers that it currently doesn't cover so we can get the full environmental benefits of the program. And it also makes other improvements to support redemption centers and businesses and consumer convenience so everybody has access to redemption. Hi, I'm Julie Silverman and I work for the Conservation Law Foundation. I have the fabulous job of being the Lake Champlain Lakekeeper. And we're here on Earth Day to share what we've been doing on Earth Day picking up trash on the waterfront with a lot of great volunteers. And we're really trying to understand what is it that is in our environment that is causing all sorts of pollution and problems. So that's part of my job. We've been picking up things like foam out of the water, horrible lids, trash, picked up a whole bunch of clothes, construction debris. And what we're doing is we're now sorting it and counting it so that we can better understand where it's coming from. Where is all this trash coming from that's ending up in Lake Champlain so that we can stop the production of it or eliminate a lot of that waste. And we are at CLF working on legislation in order to do that. And one piece of legislation that we're working on is a way to improve our bottle redemption program in the state. We have a great program, but we know we can make it better. And water bottles are just one example of waste that we find all over the roads. We find it washing into our storm drains and it ends up in our lakes and in Lake Champlain. So if we can put a value on this and get people excited about collecting it and returning it like you would normally do with a soda can, then we can get rid of all of this plastic debris out of the landscape, out of our environment and also get rid of it out of our landfill because our landfill, we have one in the state of Vermont and it's just filling up. And plastic is a resource that we shouldn't be wasting and we shouldn't be making any more of. And what we're finding also over with the debris is that most of our garbage that we're finding is plastic, whether it's a cigarette butt that's plastic or we find bits of flip flops or we find food wrappers. All of that is made from plastic. And so at CLF, we're trying to figure out ways to reduce all of that waste, to make it a safer, happier, healthier place for all of us to live. And that includes people and turtles, fish, frogs, snakes and all of the other animals that we care a lot about in Vermont. Hi, I'm Deb Sacks from Net Zero, Vermont and we're here today at this wonderful Earth Day fair on Church Street with The Walk to Shop Project and what we're doing is we're educating residents in Burlington and beyond about this project to encourage more people to walk more often. And right here at our map, the way we're doing that is to give people an idea that more than 90% of Burlington residents live within a 15 minute walk from a grocery store or a laundromat and here, here's the market and this is the 15 minute walk circle, about 1500 steps. And you notice that on this map that most of Burlington is within walking distance. So this project is really encouraging more people to walk more often or to support people to walk and carry things with a high quality shopping trolley. The shopping trolley that we have is a European model. It's made in Spain and we're working together with the company to innovate a bag that can carry about 50 pounds or up to 50 pounds and five or six bags of groceries. And so it's pretty simple. This is a waterproof bag with a rain flap. You simply open it up, put your five to six bags of groceries in it and it just pulls behind you easily with one hand. So loaded, it helps the person who's trying to carry and walk longer distances. It really helps them do what they need to do, go where they need to go. Walk and shop, they can use the bus, they can use their feet and it's a really fun project. It's sponsored by the Chittin County Regional Planning Commission. We receive grant funding from them and the state of Vermont, VTrans, Mobility in Transportation Innovation Grant. People can get a trolley pretty easily from us by calling or contacting us at netzerovt.org. Or phoning me, I'm Deb, I'm director of netzerovermont and working with some great volunteers and folks to promote this project. Curb Resource Collection. We're a new residential waste hauler in the area. We currently service Shelburne, Burlington, South Burlington, Williston and Essex and we have an emphasis on reduction of landfill bound waste. So we offer a pay by the bag program for anything headed to the landfill. And then we also offer compost pick-up with all of our plants. We're out here currently celebrating Earth Day and having a great time with it. Thank you.