This past weekend, UNCW Eco teamed up with Greenpeace and Stop Titan to protest Titan America, a leading cement factory on the east coast, from building the nation’s fourth largest cement plant in the Cape Fear area. The weekend included boat tours of the Greenpeace ship “Arctic Sunrise,” a benefit concert, a training session in peaceful protest and a vigil outside L.V. Sutton Steam Plant, a Progressive Energy Fortune 500 company.

The company has previously committed to switch to renewable sources of energy by 2014. However, resistance was met by Progressive Energy’s editorial contact, Mike Hughes, when a call was made to the parents of Eco’s Greenpeace campaign coordinator, sophomore Emma Wicker.

“I got a call from my mom saying that someone named Mike Hughes from Progress Energy had left a message for me on my parents’ home phone, and he said that he wanted to talk to me,” Wicker said.

In response, Hughes maintains that he was trying to get in contact with anyone at Eco, and that he had tried several times to e-mail the club’s president.

“Before I called Emma I tried emailing the leader of the club, I think her name is Brinkley Hutchins, and never got a response. I just wanted to talk to someone involved in the vigil and remind them that we have already committed to switching to renewable resources between 2012 and 2014,” Hughes said.

He went on to explain that Progress Energy has no plans to build new, coal burning power plants. However, two plants in Person and one in Buncombe County, North Carolina, will remain as coal burning plants, while the other four will be transferred to renewable energy.

“We’ve invested more than one billion dollars in the plants in Person and Buncombe County, so we will not have those plants transfer to renewable energy,” Hughes said. “But the other four coal-burning plants we have in North Carolina will be moving towards cleaner means of electricity. It has to be a phasing process, however, because more than half of North Carolina’s electricity comes from coal burning plants and we can’t cut it off in one day.”

Despite concern for the intent of Eco’s vigil outside the Sutton site, around 40 students went to the plant to peacefully protest their distress. They discovered when they approached the site that the property line had been moved up from where it had been the previous day with the “No trespassing” sign along with it.

“We were surprised to see that after talking to the police and making sure what we were doing was okay, that the property line had been moved in the middle of the night so we couldn’t see the coal stacks as well as we could have before,” said Eco Vice President, Brady Bradshaw.

With the vigil being the culmination of the weekend’s events for Eco, many students were disappointed when no representative from Progress would agree to talk to them. However, the coal campaign was not fruitless, as the weekend accomplished many of the club’s goals in raising awareness of the harm coal and a new cement plant could do to the environment, especially the local wetlands.

“The main goal of UNCW Eco is to stop the burning of fossil fuels, which includes hazardous chemicals that Titan will be emitting into the wetlands as a result of the coal and limestone needed in order to make cement. It will not only destroy 1,800 acres of wetland from the coal fire, but it will also release ash and carbon dioxide into our water systems and air,” Bradshaw said.

To help aid the continuation of their coal campaign, the club raised $800 at the benefit concert held at the Soapbox downtown, where local bands played, and several speakers voiced their opinion.