college

Have A Green Back To School

scleaver — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:39:52 -0400

No Tray policies are spreading on university campuses. Some started this Earth Day and hopefully, more will start No Tray policies this school year. Between 50 and 60 percent of the colleges that Aramark works with went tray-less, as did 109 colleges that use Sodexo went tray-less last year.

Going tray-less, as noted in Slashfood, helps reduce food and water waste—students waste less, and there’s less water used to clean trays, a key point for states that experience a lot of drought. An Aramark study found that when a campus started a No Tray policy, they reduced food waste by 25 to 30 percent.

As Wasted Food reported earlier this year, the trayless movement is taking off, and not without its share of backlash. Where do you stand—tray or no tray?

Photo from Cooking with Kids. And, in the spirit of back to school, here’s more on green universities.

Foodie 101

scleaver — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:57:30 -0400

No longer just for agriculture departments, food studies is entering mainstream academia. As The Washington Post reported, Yale, Boston University, and New York University all offer food studies programs, and others, including the University of New Hampshire and the University of California at Davis are starting them. At Yale, the number of food-related courses has increased almost 50 percent over the last five years.

Among the courses you can take in departments from English to economics are “Cultural Foods: Geography of Food and Wine,” “Cooking Up a Storm: Exploring Food in American Culture,” and Yale’s “Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food.” And you’ll find more than papers and final exams on the syllabus, students observe in restaurants, learn how to make their own dishes, and analyze everything from competitive eating to food memoirs.

Driving the trend is the expanding awareness of food and the environmental implications, the absolute boom in popular food literature (Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are among the oft-cited), and an acceptance of food as something to be studied and young professors who want to study it. All this makes me want to go back to school—which food course would you most like to take?

Photo from Flickr.

Which College Is the Greenest?

scleaver — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0400

As if choosing a campus wasn’t hard enough, this year The Princeton Review is adding green ratings to some of their college guides. The green rating score is a composite of factors from building and transportation policies, recycling, food sourcing, and environmental courses offered.

Campuses have been going green for a while now. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education has a rating system for schools. The Worldwatch Institute outlines campus greening initiatives on its web site. And, the Sustainable Endowments Institute puts out the College Sustainability Report Card that grades 200 schools that have large endowments according to how they spend those endowments in ways that benefit the environment.

These new scorecards aren’t going unnoticed. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, according to a Princeton Review survey, 60 percent of college applicants and their parents say that the green factor would affect their application decision. Proponents claim that going green, especially with buildings, could lower costs in the long run and fit into the leadership role of universities. But, others, like Richard Vedder at the American Enterprise Institute, are concerned that going green could raise already high costs.

Photo from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry Green Campus Initiative.

Spring Break! WHOOO!

akronheim — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:47:15 -0400

This Spring Break, I went home to Philadelphia to hang out with my boyfriend (who normally resides in Los Angeles, CA), my family, and friends in D.C. In the past, I have participated in Habitat for Humanity trips to Georgia where ten or so colleges compete to see who can build a house first in one cul-de-sac, and went to Miami to visit my aunt and friends. I've never done the college Spring Break to Aruba, Cancun, or Daytona and freaked out with every other college student. I went to a ten-day Europe trip with my college friends, and a recent cruise to Mexico with my boyfriend and his grandparents, but those are the craziest trips I've ever taken during college. How lame am I?

Many college students went to those typical places for Spring Break, but others did the Habitat trip to Georgia, some went on an Alternative Spring Break to New Orleans to help rebuild, some went to Seattle and even Hawaii to visit their significant others, and others rented houses in places like North Carolina (kind of cold, but cheap!). These kinds of trips obviously utilizes plenty of plane miles; but college students are really starting to catch on to sustainable Spring Breaks. Environmental Spring Break is offered from the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, and a student from Dartmouth has even decided to forgo a traditional spring break and went to the arctic for an environmental conference. Schools like Michigan State University offer Alternative Spring Breaks focused on environmental building and stewardship in places like Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Tennessee, and the Everglades. The bonus is that these trips aren't just restricted to Michigan students, anyone can participate. These trips have the ability to unite students and create relationships that last throughout the rest of college. So maybe these trips don't really include drunken debauchery, but at least when someone asks you about your spring break, you'll remember what you did.

I know Spring Break plans are already made for this year, and mine is almost done, but college kids should think about these kinds of things for next year instead of an extravagant vacation to Cancun where the point is to get wasted and laid. It would be more valuable to sustainable thinking and action and ultimately themselves. Hey, if students from the University of Texas are doing it, anyone can!

The Graduation Pledge

Julia — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Last year, I served as the Sustainability Chair for the Student Government Association at my college. We came up with all sorts of really cool ideas to implement on our campus that semester, but the one I was most intrigued by was the Graduation Pledge.

The Graduation Pledge alliance states, “I _____ pledge to explore and take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job I consider and will try to improve these aspects of any organization for which I work.”

By making the pledge, students decide for themselves what it means to be socially and environmentally conscious. It is such a great way to incorporate this idea of carrying the green torch onto wherever you land in the next 5, 10, 20, 40 years. The Graduation Pledge serves as a reminder that you made an oath to protect the earth when you left school.

Students at over a hundred schools across the country are using the Pledge to demonstrate their commitment to the environment. Liberal Arts colleges, state universities, private research universities, grad schools, high schools, and even some schools outside the U.S. (the pledge has made it all the way to Taiwan!) are just some of the institutions that have adapted the Pledge into their graduation rituals.

Each year, more than one million students enter the workforce. If even a small percentage of those students inquired about or attempted to change the ethical practices of their employers, they could potentially make a really positive and significant progression toward what we want to see out of so many corporations in and out of the United States.

The website, www.graduationpledge.com, offers a lot of information on how to go green after graduation, how to find meaningful and socially responsible jobs, and how to investigate potential employers and their code of ethics.

This is such a cool idea. I’ve become really enthusiastic about promoting The Graduation Pledge, and I’m hoping to get it implemented at my college within the next year. I encourage all of you to check out the website. It would be a difficult idea for your school administrators to deny. Good luck!

Rent a Textbook, Save a Tree

Julia — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:00:00 -0500

Second semester is just getting started, and you know what that means: it’s time to invest your entire previous semester’s savings on textbooks! I bear good news, however. I have found alternatives.

Ever heard of renting your textbooks? Well, at Chegg.com you can, and quite easily at that. You rent your books at nearly half the cost you would have originally paid. I received brand new textbooks in the mail within days, and when I’m finished with them I just send them on back. Oh yeah, and they pay for the return shipping, too.

You don’t have to wait in those long lines at the school bookstore, and they have over 2 million book titles, so you are bound to find most, if not all, of the books you need. Most importantly, they plant a tree for every book you rent. Basically, you can’t go wrong!

Another option is accessing your books online. You download the textbook to your computer and then you have it to reference whenever you need it. It’s convenient, and it ends up saving hundreds of thousands of pages. . Not to mention the physical trauma you’ll avoid from not having to lug around those enormous hard covers all the time.

People are always complaining about the cost of books, but they rarely talk about the wastefulness of it. College students purchase about a tree per year in textbooks. According to the Green Press Initiative, over the past three years the U.S. book publishing industry has consumed an average of 20 million trees per year to print books sold in just the U.S alone. Publishing companies have become a top contributor to the destruction of forests world-wide. Educational textbooks are especially difficult to reuse because textbook companies tend to put out new editions almost ever year.

The Green Press Initiative estimates that nearly 40% of the materials found in landfills are paper products. As this paper degrades, it produces methane—a greenhouse gas with 21 times the heat trapping power of carbon dioxide that eats away at our atmosphere.

This is a crucial issue, and with numbers this big, every student counts. I encourage everyone to seek out these alternative options. Happy studying.