Greening a College Campus

Within the last several years colleges and universities have dug into the idea of turning their campuses as green as possible. And while they're doing it, in part, because the universities and colleges public relations gurus know the idea of "green living" sells well among prospective students, but at the University of Virginia it's the current students that are pretty much leading the green march, which took off in earnest at UVa in Fall 2008.

And so for other college students out there looking for ideas about what can be done to green-up a campus, here are a few ideas:

1) Ditch the cafeteria trays: The University of Virginia's dining halls ditched almost all the dining hall trays in Fall 2008 in an effort to save on the water that washes them. Students who led that effort noticed in a trial run in previous years - when the trays were taken away for a day - that students also tended to throw less food away because they had to carry all their food in their hands and did not feel compelled to fill a tray up with more than they were going to eat.

2) Compost dining hall trash: After the trays were ditched, a group of UVa students got the green idea of composting the dining hall waste. Because of the health risks they had to get permission from the Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality. The idea led the univerisity to partner with a company in the Charlottesville area that deals in compost, one that agreed to store the waste as it composted.

3) Consider creating conservation challenges among dorms, by getting the facilities management at your college to report on which dorms are using the least amount of water, or whose electricity use drops the most over a certain time period.

4) There isn't anything much greener than getting your college administration to set aside a plot of land for a community garden. With more students taking classes during the summer, there is likely someone who could tend to the garden pass May each year, someone who could put fall crops down.

5) If your college or university puts up holiday decorations that include lights, suggest replacing those lights with more energy efficient ones, once the old lights burn out. This is a link to a site that talks about the benefits of decorating with energy efficient lights: http://www.edf.org/article.cfm?contentID=5619&campaign=480