The fall semester is in full swing at colleges and universities across the country. This CAP cross-post offers seven steps to make a dorm more environmentally friendly:
Shop at the thrift store. When shopping for your dorm room, there’s nothing wrong with buying used items. Not only does it save money, which is extremely important in college, it also helps the environment by cutting down on resources used in making new items.
Use a power strip. Plug the electronics in your room into a power strip. That way, when you leave the room you can turn everything off with just one switch, making it easier to conserve energy.
Buy a plant. Many students invest in air filters and air fresheners in order to make their rooms more comfortable, although both products use unnecessary energy. Getting a plant for the room is a much greener alternative as it will naturally purify the air in the room.
Limit disposable cups and plates. College students love to eat, but with the hectic schedules of college, students often have to eat as quickly as possible. Disposable cups and plates make it easy to eat fast but they add up over time, resulting in much unnecessary physical and financial waste.
Use green toiletries. Many people forget that toiletries can be green, too. Almost all toiletries””soap, toothpaste, mouthwash, etc.””have natural alternatives that are healthier for both you and the environment, so shop for greener toiletries next time you go to the store.
Sleep green. Organic bedding is a very simple way to go green. Bedding with organic cotton can be found pretty much anywhere these days and it’s just as comfortable as bedding with regular cotton, without the nasty pesticides.
Recycle. We hear this all the time, but there are still plenty of people who are quick to throw recyclables into the trash can. When setting up your dorm room, make sure to get a recycle bin to go with your trash can. Many colleges and universities offer easy ways and incentives to recycle on campus, so students should definitely take advantage whenever possible.
There are many more ways to go green in college but following these seven steps is a great way for students to get started.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Best Air-Filtering House Plants According to NASA!
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/02/air-filtering-plants-indoors-air-quality-benzen-formaldehyde.php
One Necessary Step (Now) For a Sane Future
In the hopes that lots of people from 17-25 may be reading here, I’ll chip in my two cents from having been in university environments (Berkeley, Harvard) long ago and also corporate environments (Chevron, McKinsey, Disney, etc.) — now sitting here at nearly 52.
Sad to say, but my view is that the young generations are going to have to speak out — clearly, persistently, visibly, and not softly — about climate change and one or two other real big problems, until society is compelled to face and begin to address those problems, seriously and soon.
In my view, the socks can stay dirty longer, the beds unmade, and if you don’t get around to changing light bulbs tomorrow, no matter, IF everyone uses the extra time (and more) to get much more visible, much more active, and much more vocal regarding the need for society to get its act together, and soon. Otherwise, it’s not gonna happen, and it’s your futures at stake.
Scientists have done their best to make the science clear and state their concerns about the future. Oodles of ethicists have also made the moral case for change and have indeed stated the obvious, that present generations will be letting down future generations, doing a great injustice to them, and s_rewi_g them over (forgive the missing letters, please) if present generations don’t act to address the problem. In other words, again, it’s your futures at stake — as well as the futures of your own children that you’ll eventually have, or many of you anyhow.
If you think that matters are in good hands, you’d probably be wise to think again.
Also, my thought is this: Realizing that the internet can be helpful to exchange information and to communicate with each other, plan, and so forth, it is nowhere near sufficient to actually bring about change of the sorts and degrees needed. Not even close. Nor will small once-a-month activities during lunchtime on campus be enough. In my view, present activities amount to whistling against a 50 mph wind.
All generations are going to have to work on societal change together, but young college-age and high school-age generations, and people in their twenties, are going to have to speak out and “not take no for an answer”.
Be Well,
Jeff
Just saw an ExxonMobil ad here — whatever you call those ads that just show up on the screen.
You’re right, Jeff- young people, especially students, need to get with it.
The best thing we can do for dorm rooms is to supply microprocessor based systems that make sure that the heater/AC isn’t burning up power when the students aren’t in their rooms (about 60% of the time). I can’t get university facilities managers to discuss this with me, because it’s too much trouble. Administrators over their heads need to take note.
Jeff Huggins has it right! As students, my generation became very active against the Vietnam war because it was just wrong. But our intense motivation was that, because of the draft, it profoundly impacted each of us — far more than other Americans. The same certainty of special direct impact from global climate change needs to motivate today’s college students to an even greater activism, as it is the habitability of the whole planet during your lifetime that is at stake.
The human mind is not good at giving sufficient weight to relatively slow but inexorable trends in the face of immediate pressing matters, which is one of several reasons that the generations before yours (mine especially) have failed to deal with this looming catastrophe. Of course, another reason is the well-funded active suppression of knowledge by people in power, such as fossil fuel executives, that have much to gain in the short term by ignoring the looming catastrophe that they may be too old to have to live through (only complete denial can explain how they can be so cavalier with their own children’s and grandchildren’s futures). Joe Romm has likened our economy to a Ponzi scheme, but it is worse than that, as today’s children and the as-yet-unborn generations that will be the most impacted have been scammed without even having had an opportunity to say “No!”
It may be up to those at most risk to yell the loudest, as too many of the rest of us are in denial or have been hoodwinked. I know that if young voters in the U.S. did no more than show up en mass a week from Tuesday to vote against the climate deniers, instead of sitting out this unusually critical midterm election, it could tip the scales in the U.S. government, for which the world has been waiting too long for climate and energy leadership. It might even give pause to those same climate deniers who have been working so hard — and so far unbelievably effectively — to gain additional power through obstructionism followed by secretly-funded astroturf movements to channel the resulting anger away from themselves.
Students of the world, unite! Insist on corporations getting charged for externalities like the pollution of our common air, water, and land with greenhouse gases, oil spills, and other socially destructive and/or risky behavior. Get up out of your chairs and vote against those many, often heavily advertised, candidates and initiatives (like Props 23 and 26 in California) that are for business as usual in the face of both looming energy shortages and climate catastrophe!