Bishop’s Environmental Club ran temporary thrift shop for charity
By William Crooks
Local Journalism Initiative
The Bishop’s University (BU) Environmental Club ran a temporary thrift shop out of the Norton building on Bishop’s’ campus Sept. 6. The Record visited and spoke with BU student and Environmental Club member Charles Beaudet for information on this and the club’s future plans.
“We want to sell back items that were discarded at Bishop’s,” Beaudet began, like donated old clothes, bedsheets, and other items. They were going to be thrown out anyways, he added. They collected everything up and are selling it all back to BU students at a low price.
All the money that they are gathering is going to the BU refugee centre, he went on. The centre helps refugees and international students “come [to BU] and settle in”. This thrift store project was conceived of by the Environmental Club and Sustainable Development (SD) office. Beaudet is an intern at the SD office and has been working on this project for the past few weeks. Whatever they don’t sell, he said, he will bring to EstrieAide, a local second-hand store in Sherbrooke. “Every item here will have a second life and be useful eventually.”
The next activity the club is organizing is a “sustainable transport week”. The club will encourage everyone to come to BU by bus or “active transportation”: by skateboard, bicycle, or walking. Anything that is not a car, he insisted. Cars, even electric ones, are dangerous, expensive, and polluting, he noted. “The campus should be safe for students, not cars.”
Another club event on the horizon will involve a local bicycle repairman visiting and showing BU students how to repair their own bikes. The repairman has already come twice this summer to repair bikes and now he is going to show others how to do it themselves, Beaudet said.
