Northwest Indiana’s annual Earth Day celebration offered up 55 vendors at the Porter County Expo Center Saturday morning in celebration of the country’s 55th anniversary of the creation of Earth Day.
The mood was upbeat as families with young children and folks toting free saplings mingled among gorgeous rain barrels, electric vehicles, and exotic animals while live steel pan music filled the air. Nine-year-old Abbi Wegrzyn-Sanchez, of Valparaiso, was enjoying the live animal show with her mom and three siblings.
“I actually got super pumped,” she said after leaving the stage where she got to hold a young alligator. “When I got on the stage, I didn’t even expect he was going to pick me.”
Across the room, Valparaiso High School seniors from the VHS Earth Awareness Club were offering face painting to add to the fun.
The club conducts recycling at the school as well as projects in the community. Student Anthony Olivarez, who’s heading to the University of Colorado Boulder as an environmental studies major this fall, said the club recently helped Meadowbrook Nature Preserve clean the seeds of native plant species for distribution.
“It’s cool to see the youth,” said Keri Marrs-Baron, executive director of Porter County Recycling & Waste Reduction, which sponsors the celebration.
She said food waste and plastic are the two biggest trends in the recycling world right now. Her office just started a residential food collection drive offered on Wednesdays at the Coffee Creek Farmers Market. Typical food compost items like vegetable scraps are welcome, but no bones or dairy.
Down the hall in the kid zone, Boy Scout Troop 907 from First Christian Church in Valparaiso is helping children build birdhouses for bluebirds.
“It’s great. I love it,” said eighth grader Christopher Szevery as he helped Memphis Rugg, a first-grader at Morgan Township Elementary School, build his birdhouse. Christopher said his troop has been preparing the materials for the past month. “Not all of them are perfect,” he said.
Memphis didn’t mind. “It’s cool,” he said, saying he’d put the house “maybe in my backyard.”
The fair didn’t just draw children. Ariel Bribiesca, of Valparaiso, was touring with her relatives on her day off from Pratt Industries, which makes boxes from 100% recycled paper pulp right next door to the Expo Center. Her grandma, Carmen Gonzalez, of Lowell, is a repeat visitor.
She said last year she “learned about those pods that you shouldn’t use in your dishwasher because they don’t disintegrate all the way.” Saturday, she collected a tick identification card. “It was really interesting,” Gonzalez said.
Even those who just wanted a good shop could do so with an array of suncatchers, jewelry and art made from recycled materials, and other eco-friendly goods such as Ink Forest Eco-Friendly Screen Printing. Owner Judy Mazzuca said she’s the only woman-owned and Green America green-certified screenprinter in the country.
“The pigments are suspended in oil and they’re melted on top, which is why they crack and peel,” she explained of traditional plastisol screen printing. “You also need benzene to clean them off.”
The PVC used is also a known endocrine disruptor. Water-based inks, by contrast, are suspended in water, which evaporates, leaving the ink infused into the fabric, she said.
For those fired up to do something about environmental toxins, the Citizens’ Climate Lobby was taking names.
Gary Jump, a volunteer from Illinois, was hoping to reinvigorate the Northwest Indiana chapter, which has been without a chapter leader since last year. “You’ve got to go for singles, not home runs all the time,” he said of the effort to garner more individual interest and “get Congress to pass more legislation to deal with climate change.”
Earth Day is on April 22 each year. For more information on its origin, go to earthday.org.
Shelley Jones is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
