“Pomp and Circumstance” accompanies the annual spring rites of commencement, as thousands of bright-eyed college graduates depart for the real world. Another, less memorable (and certainly more environmentally-damaging) tradition usually follows immediately after: the dumping of four years’ worth of Ikea futons, mini-fridges, Greek life t-shirts and dog-eared textbooks — items that’ll be purchased by the cartload by incoming freshman next fall.
Undergraduate move-out day generates tons of waste. Student activists on these three college campuses created more efficient systems to reuse and recycle.
University of New Hampshire
The first student-run sustainability initiative of its kind in the country, Trash2Treasure at this college in Durham, N.H., makes storage easier for on-campus students who have limited options for where to stash their furniture over the summer; in the process, they diverted 110 tons from dumpsters. Unwanted items are picked up at the end of each academic year, then sold to newcomers in the fall. It’s profitable enough as a business model that it actually generates more money than it spends to operate — earning $55,000 in revenue for future initiatives, as well as saving the school $10,000 in cleanup costs and parents more than $200,000 on dorm furnishings.
“Thousands of reusable items clog up streets and sidewalks and are sent to landfills every year,” Alex Freid, a UNH student who co-created T2T, tells The Boston Globe. “This is a problem campuses, towns, and cities have been seeing for 20 or 30 years, so they love to see students taking initiative and solving the problem.” Freid now runs the Post-Landfill Action Network, a nonprofit bringing the methods they refined at UNH to other campuses like University of Massachusetts, Tulane University in New Orleans, Northeastern and the College of William and Mary. “Our goal is to help campuses achieve zero waste, and move-out waste is a really great way to start,” Freid adds. “What we’re trying to do is to build universities as microcosms of how the world can and should function in the future.”
Yale University
A decade ago, this Ivy League school in New Haven, Conn., began the annual “Spring Salvage.” The program is based on a simple concept: “All students have to do is look for the blue and gray donation bins as they move out,” says Gabriel Roy-Liguori, a rising senior who helps coordinate the collection. “Blue bins are for soft items” — clothes, shoes, towels, sheets — “gray ones are for hard items” — books, lamps, electronics. There’s some mild confusion every year with a handful of students who think the 150 collection bins are meant for trash, but for the most part, the initiative salvages plenty of perfectly good items. Last year, more than 60,000 pounds of items were donated to Goodwill Industries. Overall, waste declined from 101 tons in 2013 to 93 tons last year, and a greater percentage went to charity instead of the landfill.
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Arizona State University
At the largest campus in the country, students on five campuses around Phoenix diverted 156,860 pounds of waste by redirecting it to charity, repurposing it for next year’s students or recycling it. The “Ditch the Dumpster” campaign works similar to other salvage programs, but at a huge scale. “When 9,000 students leave campus in the course of a week, you have to be on top of your game,” says Elizabeth Kather, a former member of the Sun Devils’ program. “You need a dedicated team — one that can be nimble as things change and react quickly to the needs of the program.” With this year’s move-out program, which launched on Earth Day, they’re hoping to exceed last year’s total, breaking past 78 tons.
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Tag: yale
Do Trees Actually Cause Climate Change?
There’s probably nothing more symbolic of the green movement than a tall, leafy tree. Along with protecting our forests, planting a tree to offset one’s carbon footprint has now become de rigueur in fighting climate change.
However, in the recent New York Times op-ed, “To Save the Planet, Don’t Plant Trees,” Yale professor Nadine Unger smacks several holes in conventional green wisdom. And to no one’s surprise, it’s causing some backlash in the scientific community.
Unger’s article boils down to three (controversial) points about trees and forests:
1. Trees give off harmful pollution. “Trees emit reactive volatile gases that contribute to air pollution and are hazardous to human health…As these compounds mix with fossil-fuel pollution from cars and industry, an even more harmful cocktail of airborne toxic chemicals is created.”
2. Planting forests in colder places might cause the planet to bake. “The dark color of trees means that they absorb more of the sun’s energy and raise the planet’s surface temperature….Planting trees in the tropics would lead to cooling, but in colder regions, it would cause warming.”
3. Stopping deforestation is not the best way to mitigate global warming. “The science says that spending precious dollars for climate change mitigation on forestry is high-risk: We don’t know that it would cool the planet, and we have good reason to fear it might have precisely the opposite effect. More funding for forestry might seem like a tempting easy win for the world leaders at the United Nations, but it’s a bad bet.”
If your head is spinning, you’re not alone. After the article came out, a slew of top scientists came out to strongly rebuke Unger’s article.
MORE: 3 Reasons Why Sunday’s Historic Climate March Could Be the Start of Something Huge
“Nadine Unger argues that reducing deforestation and planting trees won’t help fix climate change but will rather make it worse,” Steve Schwartzman, Director of Tropical Forest Policy writes. “One might ask how the 2,000-plus scientists and experts on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) got this one wrong — they found tropical deforestation a major source that must be reduced to control climate change – but in fact it’s Unger who’s way out on a limb here.”
And in another response called “Dr. Unger’s Four Scientific Fouls,” Michael Wolosin of Climate Advisers picks apart each of Unger’s points and concludes, “Normally, this type of scientific debate would take place in specialist journals with lengthy peer review processes to ensure accuracy. And for good reason – it is a process that keeps scientists from jumping to conclusions that aren’t implied by their work, and that should not be cited as fact by others.”
There’s also this piece that was signed by 30 scientists, including six members of the National Academy and four members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Unger has since defended herself where she lists all of the sources that she points to in the Times op-ed. She also points out, “The primary key to solving the global climate problem is the transformation of our energy system into one that does not use the sky as a waste dump for our greenhouse gas pollution.”
Well, it appears Unger does have a point there. Simply put, we can’t treat our planet like a trash can. As we’ve previously reported, there are multiple ways to preventing climate change, including leaving our precious forests alone. But really, according to near scientific consensus, the best way to stop climate change is by cutting carbon pollution through conserving energy and curbing our reliance on fossil fuels.
Hopefully this is something we can all agree on.
DON’T MISS: The Top 5 Ways to Fight Global Warming
How a Two-Week Bootcamp is Getting Vets Ready for Higher Learning
In 2008, Chris Howell began thinking of life after the military. He was serving in the Australian Army, Special Operations Command and was eager to head back to school, reinforced by some timely advice from his younger brother, David. “He said to me, ‘look, you can blow in a door and attack a room, but you need to learn how to read and write an essay.'” David, a top student at Sydney University at the time, took it one step further, putting together a crash-course of materials to help Chris prepare for college life. Five years later, this informal boot-camp became the basis of the Warrior-Scholar Project.
In 2012, Chris Howell partnered with Jesse Reisling and launched the project from Yale, offering a two-week intensive bootcamp for veterans returning to school. In addition to offering classes at Yale this year, they were also available at Harvard and the University of Michigan. By next year, the group plans to hold classes on 10 campuses.
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Jesse Reising, founder of the Warrior-Scholar Project, has become a NationSwell Council member.
Can Higher Education Be Free?
What are international would-be college students to do if they can’t afford the rising costs of a college education? Fortunately, for those that want to learn, a new university has just been accredited.
Fittingly called The University of the People, this four-year college is tuition-free and staffed mostly by volunteers from prestigious schools that charge a bit more, including Yale, NYU, and Stanford.
Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef opened the California-based college in 2009. With hopes to expand the curriculum, currently this college offers two- and four-year degrees in computer science and business administration. Students hail from 143 countries, and this month, seven students will become the first University of the People graduates.
Though perhaps you haven’t heard of it, tons of people have. Reshef told The National Journal that the University of the People has 1.2 million followers on Facebook, more than any other U.S. university except Harvard.
To join the college, students need to have a high school diploma, be proficient in English, and have an Internet connection. Even the Internet connectivity requirement is flexible — all lessons and conversations are posted in text form, so students without broadband don’t miss out on audio or video learning. Classes are nine weeks long and involve intensive virtual discussions, daily homework, weekly quizzes graded by international peers, and final exams overseen by a local proctor.
Earlier this year, the University of the People became an accredited university, recognized by the Department of Education. Reshef hopes that the accreditation will lead to more students, and ideally, more funding from philanthropists. By 2016, he hopes to have 5,000 students and raise $5 million.
“We’re building a model because we want to show that there is another way to deliver higher education,” Reshef told The National Journal. “It shouldn’t cost as much as it costs.” In addition to a volunteer base, the school uses open source technology and open education materials to keep costs at a minimum.
Students at the University of the People have the opportunity to meet and collaborate with hundreds of other students from around the globe. This cost-free, virtual education model is a promising way to get diplomas into the hands of some of the poorest students in the world.