Think Green Live Clean
After two weeks and five rounds of intense judging from professors and students alike, the winner of ThinkGreenLiveClean’s first ever ‘Greenest Student College Challenge’, has finally been selected! But let me tell you, it was no easy decision! With so many creative, ambitious, and enthusiastic ‘Green Resolutions’ submitted, our job as judges was extraordinarily difficult! Here is our winner’s ‘Green Resolution’ for all to read… and we hope that with your new iPad, Brennan, you will be able to save even more trash from the landfill! Also, because our final round consisted of five other awesome ‘Green Resolutions’, we wanted to share them with you here as well. Runner-ups are listed in no particular order. Feel free to leave comments below!
Winner Brennan Bird from UC Davis
“Waste” is an illusion –a resource in the wrong place. I aim to do all I can to share this value with the world. My name is Brennan Bird and I’m a senior Nature & Culture major at UC Davis. Since January 1st, 2010, I have been saving all of my non-biodegradable waste packaging in a project I’ve titled Operation Zero Waste 2010—Less We Can! The project started with my desire to live a zero waste lifestyle, personally striving to decrease my consumption of non-biodegradable waste packaging while developing methods to creatively reuse, recycle, or repurpose the packaging that I have accumulated.
By saving my trash for an entire year, I hope to show that we can take personal responsibility for our impact on this Earth. Every piece of trash that I have produced has been washed, dried, and stored in my room. Almost all of my food and paper scraps have been composted, and returned as nutrients into the Earth. All my recyclable glass bottles and aluminum cans will be reused, or creatively repurposed into artistic pieces or functional tools. All my plastic non-recyclable waste has been stuffed into plastic bottles as Portable Landfill Devices, plastic bottles filled to the point of compression with plastic trash that are then used as “bricks” to build structures out of cob or cement.
This school year will be devoted to reusing or repurposing all my accumulated packaging. I also will teach a class to show other students how to work to decrease their packaging consumption. On January 1st, 2011, I will put a year’s worth of trash on my bicycle and ride around Davis, in an effort to raise awareness about turning our personal values into real action.
Read more on his project here and here
Runner-Up Chris Michael from the University of Wyoming
I am a junior double majoring in Political Science and Environment and Natural Resources here at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. While most other entries talk about how green their school and town is, I’m not fortunate enough to say that. In fact, I’m in a town that is the complete opposite of green. Instead of getting down about it, I have recently chosen to take on the town with a recycling advocacy movement. My plan is to create a pro-recycling campaign that coincides with the advent of the newly mandated curbside recycling program in order to do a few things. One is to respond to the ignorance and/or negative views of the community towards recycling. Others include reducing the influx of recyclable material into the local landfill, fostering an ethic of community sustainability and understanding of the larger effects we have on the earth, and finally ensuring successful and sustainable recycling in our town. In Wyoming, the attitude of “no one tells me what to do” flourishes. This is a giant obstacle to overcome and will take a lot of research on my part to develop methods about how to get residents to buy into the movement.
I plan on carrying this project out by coordinating with the City of Laramie in order to find out how to properly educate residents about the benefits of recycling. Also by researching methods used to break down the Wyoming “No one tells me what to do” mindset in order to integrate them into the community-recycling program. Other ways include researching the how best to use social media and promotional methods in order to gain the attention and respect of the community. Finally, I will continue the designing process by producing logos and other artwork, and then implement them into the campaign.
Runner-Up Ian from Hawaii
Travel to the Hawaiian Islands is mainly done by jet, a major contributor to global warming. Once in Hawaii tourists continue to consume and not necessarily give anything back to the place they travel, with the exception of dollars. My goal this year is to incorporate tourists into volunteering with their hotel through 3 options: a beach cleanup to promote ocean conservation, a water quality monitoring experience to expand their WQ (pun intended), and a beach watcher survey that monitors human use impacts in order to help tourists and policy makers understand the carrying capacity of Waikiki Beach. My whole project is based around a video series available online for viewing so that I can have a ‘hands off approach’ and allowing visitors to take 1 hour out of their vacation to do something meaningful, but at their convenience. Learn, Share, Inspire.
Runner-Up Ian Gaudreau from the University of New Hampshire
I am currently a student at the University of New Hampshire, one of the greenest campuses in the United States, studying Environmental Conservation Studies. As a Residential Assistant, I look after over 120 students in my dormitory, with access to many more students throughout campus. For my Greenest Resolution, I wanted to try and do something motivating that could get everyone in my building involved in this cause. So, I decided to develop a “How to be a Green Student at UNH” guide. This guide has 20 easy steps that students can follow to go green around the dormitory. From encouraging reusable water bottles to using CFL light bubs, each task is very easy and has sparked a lot of interest in my dormitory. The guide includes facts, statistics, and resources that the students can look up to learn more about a fact that interests them. Going Green does not always involve some huge and crazy idea…my philosophy is that the best way we can currently help the planet is to change our bad habits by educating what these bad habits are. By providing easy ways to save energy and go green, my residents can now spread the word to others and encourage their friends to pick up on the tips in the guide! Finally, to save paper, all of the guides were submitted electronically to their school email accounts and I plan on having a meeting in the future to follow up and see how many people have been implementing these steps into their daily lives.
Runner-Up Erin Harper
This year on campus I am working on increasing the amount of local food served in the residence halls and available to students. Our campus has a student farm that started two years ago, and I have been involved from the beginning. I serve on the committee that provided the $75,000 for the start up costs and have been volunteering on the farm since then. This past summer I interned on the farm working as a field hand.
Now that the season here in Illinois is winding down my duties have changed to a more organizing roll. The farm is currently 3 acres but is looking to be 10 acres by 2015, which takes planning. To supplement the amount of labor needed as the farm expands I am developing a course for students. The course would be held over the summer and teach students about small-scale organic farming. They would in turn work on the farm providing free labor. This will help the farm handle 10 acres, and once the farm is 10 acres, it would be able to provide approximately 15% of the produce for the school.
During our peak production time most of the students are not on campus. To solve this problem I am looking into ways the University can preserve foods that cannot be grown here year round and looking for funding for additional climate controlled storage. I am also working with Dining Services to find more local growers (local is defined as 180 miles) and producers, and to pinpoint the products that the farm can produce to best fill the gaps of produce they can get locally. I am also working on setting up student gardens at the residence halls and a community garden for students not living in residence halls.
Runner-Up James Souder
As an Environmental Sustainability major, the following statistics irk me: More than 40 percent of all food produced in America is not eaten, amounting to more than 29 million tons of food thrown away each year. Many college cafeterias contribute to this problem, with some schools averaging 600 tons of food waste every year. The amount of resources and fossil fuels used to produce, process and transport this wasted food is astonishing. Reducing food waste on college campuses, or finding proactive ways to use this food, would benefit not only the environment, but would also address social and economic problems.
Granted, many colleges (including mine) have taken incredible initiative to reduce food waste, such as getting rid of trays or starting a compost system for the campus garden. However, through working in my school’s cafeteria this past summer, I noticed individuals taking advantage of the compost system by tossing entire pans of untouched food into the compost bin. In my opinion, compost is no place for perfectly edible food and should only be used for scraps as a final step in the food cycle, especially when there are people in our communities struggling to find a hot meal to eat.
These are all reasons why I helped create a system to take leftover food from our university’s cafeteria to a local homeless shelter. Once or twice a week, I fill up the back seat of my car with reusable aluminum pans full of untouched food and deliver them to the shelter. Grateful arms carry the food into a walk-in refrigerator, and full pans are traded for empty pans from my last delivery. My green resolution is to expand this food delivery system by educating others about the environmental benefits of reducing food waste—starting by submitting this “greenest resolution” comment!
