By: Leslee DeRossett

Spring Arbor University students coming back to the 2020 fall semester have seen many changes. This is also true for the SAU competitive cheer team. In August, SAU named Jessica Dowling as its new head coach of the competitive cheer program.

Cheer is not new to Dowling, between four years as a member of her high school varsity competitive cheer and sideline cheer teams and eight years as the Addison Community Schools middle school competitive cheerleading coach, the middle school sideline cheerleading coach, as well as the varsity competitive assistant coach. She guided her team to five straight Cascades championships, along with three consecutive undefeated seasons.

Dowling may be new to the SAU competitive cheer team, but she is not new to SAU. When Dowling is not working with her competitive cheer team, she is teaching as a professor in the SAU School of Education.

Dowling said, “The number one thing I enjoy the most coaching for SAU is working with my athletes and building a tight-knit team. The girls are amazing and all so unique in the best way! We are a perfect mix and have formed a great bond already.”

The SAU competitive cheer team is new as of last year.

“Another thing I enjoy about coaching cheer at SAU is building a foundation for years to come. I have really enjoyed working to build a program which strives in character and is centered in faith. We are eager for a safe return for big crowds as we have some big ideas for community involvement at SAU.”

Jessica Dowling

By Sarah Williams 

 During Spring Arbor University’s (SAU) spring break, SAU students went on mission trips to Guatemala, Las Vegas and North Carolina.  

Post-Undergraduate Outreach Ministry Intern (PUOMI) Cecilia Said, helped plan and coordinate SAU mission experiences and encourage students to become involved in the community.   

The mission trip locations were chosen based on different types of service opportunities provided for students. Guatemala was chosen for its relational ministry aspects, the Las Vegas trip focused on prayer and the North Carolina trip focused on service work.  

When Said was planning the trips, she wanted each student to deepen their understanding of their faith, understand how their presence can impact others and what it means to be a follower of Christ.  

According to Said, 38 students volunteered for the mission trips. Seven students went to North Carolina, 20 went to Guatemala and 11 went to Las Vegas.  

Johnathan Husted, student leader for the North Carolina mission trip, said he went on the trip for the manual labor.  

The main goal of the trip was to help Hurricane Florence victims get their houses up to code for an inspection so they can move in permanently. The campers provided to the victims by the government were being taken away at the end of March. 

“There is something about working hard for someone else with no expectations of getting anything in return that makes me feel fulfilled,” Husted said.  

The trip was one week. Excluding drive time, the students spent five days in North Carolina. They would get up at 7 a.m., have a devotion, work and then debrief during dinner. They had a recreation day where the students toured a battleship and watched the sunset on the beach.  

Kensington Thomas volunteered for the Guatemala mission trip. The students assisted with God’s Child Project, a center for malnourished babies, as well as Casa Jackson school and Obras Sociales hospital for people with severe disabilities. 

At the God’s Child project, the students fed babies, changed diapers, cleaned up around the facility, cleaned windows, folded clothes, moved heavy items and played with the children. At the school, they helped teachers grade assignments and played with the kids. At the hospital, they fed children and took a Zumba class with kids in wheelchairs. 

The volunteers would get to the facilities at 8 a.m. and stay until 12 p.m. They volunteered for four days. They also visited other places in Guatemala and learned Spanish. The students went to the Mayan village where they ate traditional food, made tortillas, drank coffee, acted out a traditional Mayan wedding and bought homemade souvenirs. They also went to Antigua where they did a historical tour of old cathedrals and buildings.  

The students stayed with host families during part of the experience. Thomas’s host house had six girls. Other houses had either seven or nine. The host families cooked all of their meals and provided them with a living space.  

“I learned a lot about the culture. The food was amazing, and the people were so kind,” said Thomas.  

Carol Nichol volunteered for the Las Vegas mission trip. She said she felt called to go when people from Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and Grace City Church came to her peer advisor meeting and discussed the trip.  

Nichol said the trip initially seemed out of her comfort zone, yet she trusted in God’s faithfulness and protection.

The students packed sack lunches and ate with the homeless. They led worship on the street outside the MGM hotel and offered testimony and the gospel. They went into gas stations and motels to pass out flyers of three missing children that were at risk of being trafficked. One of the children was found the next day.  

Co-leader of the Las Vegas Trip, Brandon Valentine, said they also provided worship for people on the Las Vegas strip, offering “Free Prayer” on Fremont St. and worshipping with middle schoolers on the week-long trip.  

“Our commitment statement toward one another was, ‘to have zero expectations but one: to serve wholeheartedly’,” Valentine said. 

According to Nichol, the trip schedule consisted of cleaning the YWAM base after breakfast. They had quiet time and evangelism training for their outreach. Then, they ate lunch, went out on their outreach, debrief and had dinner. Finally, they would have another outreach or team bonding experience.  

Nichol said her favorite moment was when they were worshipping outside the MGM hotel and some police officers told them they couldn’t have an amplifier resting on the ground as it was blocking foot traffic. The students picked the amplifier up and sang gospel music for another half an hour. Many people stopped and joined in. 

According to Said, SAU does mission trips for multiple reasons: Mission trips allow students the opportunity to broaden their worldview, give them the opportunity to engage with Christian organizations and ministries, give them a glimpse into the lives of others, provide love and encouragement and to allow students to participate in the world with Jesus at the forefront.  

By Kaylee Clayton

Until 2018, the United States shipped roughly 7 million tons of plastic to China each year. In China, the plastic was sorted, broken down and reused to create new materials. Paper and aluminum was also shipped over from the U.S.

Not just the U.S. but about 70 percent of the world’s plastic waste went to China according to NPR writer Christopher Joyce. Many Chinese people became millionaires with new recycling businesses that bought the world’s trash and made money from processing and selling it. Joyce said this aided in making China the second wealthiest economy in the world.

At U.S. West Coast ports, empty Chinese shipping containers that had delivered goods to American consumers were sent back full of plastic and paper recycling. While American recycling machines often struggled with breaking down certain types of plastics, China had the capacity to handle the plastics with enough cheap laborers to sort the recyclable materials.

About five years ago, the Chinese government began to worry about the amount of incoming plastic. Much of the plastic was contaminated, which made it difficult to recycle and unprofitable. In 2017, the Chinese government implemented stricter regulations and began to cut down plastic trash imports. In January 2018, China banned almost all imports. “That means a huge amount of plastic is looking for a place to go,” said Joyce.

This left American recyclers with three options: pay a higher price for recycling, send it to different countries, or send it to the landfill.

“Plastic is getting separated at paper factories, dumped in neighboring communities, and the only way to get rid of it is to openly burn it,” said environmental activist Stiv Wilson. “Air, water, and land are all affected.”

Many smaller cities that feel they cannot afford to pay more for recycling choose to incinerate their recycling rather than pay for recycling, which results in harmful toxins being released into the air. Keefe Harrison who runs the nonprofit Recycling Partnership, said “more plastic in the U.S. is ending up in landfills or getting incinerated, which creates pollution.”

Shipments of plastic waste are now diverted to Southeast Asian countries instead of China. These shipments have increased exponentially since 2018. According to Laura Parker from National Geographic, exports from the U.S. to Thailand jumped almost 7,000 percent in one year. Malaysia’s increased several hundred percent. Those numbers have begun to decrease since those countries have cut back on imports.

Alana Samuels reported in The Atlantic that waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties there is no longer a market for their recycling. Recycling is ending at a time when the United States is producing more waste than ever before.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the total amount of municipal waste was 208.3 million tons in 1990 and 262.4 million tons in 2015. According to Frontier Group, “The U.S. produces more than 30 percent of the planet’s total waste, though it is home to only 4 percent of the world’s population.” A Columbia University study estimated Americans throw out seven pounds of materials per person every day, which is 2,555 pounds of materials per year.

The Zero-Waste Movement proposes an alternative to shipping waste to other countries and landfills. This idea started 20 years ago when Daniel Knapp, Ph.D., CEO, Urban Ore, Inc., a Material Recovery Enterprise in Berkeley, California, shared his research around the world on his idea of “No Waste.”

The Zero-Waste Movement encourages the redesign of resource life cycles so all products are reused. By eliminating single-use items, plastic water bottles, Ziploc baggies and plastic straws, one can live a lifestyle of reducing and reusing. The goal is for no trash to be sent to other countries, landfills, incinerators or the ocean. Of the 260 million tons of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the ocean, according to a Greenpeace report. Plastic Oceans reported that “more than 8 million tons of plastic are dumped in the oceans every year.”

The Zero-Waste Movement encourages people to take responsibility for their product consumption and only use materials that can be reused. Some individuals have managed to keep

all the waste they have created for several years in a 16 oz. mason jar. Lauren Singer, environmental activist and CEO of Simple Co., kept all the trash she made in four years in a 16 oz. jar. She began with eliminating single-use plastic, analyzing what her trash consisted of, composting raw materials, making her own products, and investing in sustainable and reusable alternatives.

Spring Arbor University (SAU) junior and environmentalist Madilyn Nissley said “the Zero-Waste Movement is a good thing, but if someone cannot commit to changing everything in their life then it

feels overwhelmingly impossible.” The Zero-Waste Movement could be the answer to America’s current recycling dilemma.