Campus Sustainability Research

As promised, a sample blog post...

Friday in class, Dick Shuck, our director of purchasing, made the point that university students - by pressuring their own colleges to adopt greener practices and policies - have been influencing corporations to produce products in more sustainable ways.  Because universities are significant economic actors, their institutional purchasing decisions send much more powerful signals about consumer demand than do our  individual purchasing decisions.

But how do students exercise this influence on their own campuses?  What kinds of changes are they encouraging?  And how are they getting it done?

Here's a link to a website where you can learn a ton about what students (as well as faculty and staff members) are doing to fight global warming, support green energy, reduce waste, and promote more responsible consumption on colleges campuses across the U.S.:

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education is a nonprofit association of colleges and universities that pools knowledge and resources about sustainability in campus practices and curricula.  DePauw is a member of AASHE, and for that reason, you have access to a variety of "member only" resources about issues like those you are addressing through your projects for this class.  DePauw also participates in AASHE's "Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System" (STARS), which rates campuses on a scale from Bronze to Platinum in terms of their overall sustainability profiles.  (We are currently a 'Bronze' institution.)  You can use these sites to find out what is happening on other campuses in connection to the sort of project you are working on - whether move in/move out, energy consumption, food waste, recycling, etc.

Explore these websites thoroughly, and if you run into any challenges finding the information you are looking for, check with Professor Pope, myself, or Anthony Baratta.