Climate Action Evanston will host its inaugural Litter League game, a community-based event addressing trash in Evanston, on Nov. 22. In this game, the Northwestern University Wildcat and Evanston Township High School Wildkit teams will face off to pick up as much garbage as they can in the area surrounding ETHS.
“We thought that by getting people together to pick up the litter, it will allow us to have some good ‘aha’ moments with people about just how broken a system it is that is so reliant on single-use, throw-away containers,” CAE Beyond Waste Program Lead Tom Mulhern said.
The Wildcats team will be captained by the NU chapter of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. E-Town Sunrise, a climate advocacy group at ETHS, and Interact Club, a student service club at ETHS, will co-captain the Wildkits team.
McCormick sophomore and FIJI Philanthropy Chair Jose Flores said he reached out to CAE to become involved as a way for the fraternity to give back to the Evanston community.
“I think environmental impact is always a really good thing to focus on,” Flores said. “It’s something that’s becoming more prevalent every year with more carbon emissions and things like that.”
Participants will be provided with gloves, trash bags and grabbers, and whichever team picks up the most litter at the end of the game will receive prizes, Mulhern said. While the competition aspect is designed to make the game more fun, Mulhern emphasized that the most important part is community engagement and betterment.
The inaugural game centers on engaging youth because current high schoolers and college students will inherit environmental crises, CAE Executive Director Jack Jordan (Weinberg ’22) said.
“Our investment in them today is actually creating a domino effect of climate actions for decades to come,” Jordan said. “We’re hoping that participation in Litter League by an Evanston Township High School student is just the first step in a long lifetime of actions they can take to improve their community, wherever they live.”
Litter League is funded by the Sustainable Communities Grant Program, launched this year by Northwestern’s Office of Neighborhood and Community Relations in partnership with UL Research Institutes and UL Standards & Engagement.
CAE was one of two community organizations to receive a $2,500 grant, an amount that will be doubled in next year’s grant cycle.
The program aims to fund grassroots environmental initiatives in Evanston and Skokie.
“Another key component of the grant is, ‘How do we get community engagement? How do we get people involved in partnerships and collaboration?’” Director of Evanston Community Relations EL Da’ Sheon Nix said. “To see (CAE) check off all those boxes, and to see this go from an idea to implementation, just confirms why we came together for this grant program.”
The Litter League initiative is listed as a part of the Roadmap for a Circular Evanston, a document created by CAE in collaboration with other Evanston community members to serve as a framework for realizing the city’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan commitments. CARP was approved by City Council in 2018 and calls for zero waste by 2050.
The grant money will fund not only Saturday’s game, but a “full season” of Litter League games beginning in the spring, geared toward reaching the zero-waste CARP goal, Mulhern said. His hope is that local organizations will volunteer to captain teams and host games in various Evanston neighborhoods. The Nov. 22 game will serve as a pilot for this series.
“A lot of our young people have climate anxiety, and the best remedy for anxiety is action,” Jordan said. “Take this chance to get out of the Northwestern bubble and meet some community members and have some fun.”
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