The Sustainability of GW’s Eco Challenge
If you have watched yourself turn on a light recently, you have seen a sticker announcing that GW has launched the “Eco-Challenge!!!!!!” The sentiment behind GW’s Eco-Challenge is inspiring, and it’s good to see that the University is taking steps to improve its horrendous record. GW describes the program like this:
The Eco-Challenge is a friendly competition among residence halls to determine which hall can conserve the most water and electricity throughout the academic year.
While it’s great to see that our school is taking steps to reduce it’s Foggy Bottom sized footprint, there are also some serious flaws with what is happening. The only real tangible thing I have noticed is the introduction of recycling bins on most corners. What’s frightening is that the day the bins appeared, all of them were adorned with three helium filled balloons exclaiming “GW ECO-CHALLENGE!” Yes, those harmless little advertisements that fly into the atmosphere and get choked on by ducks and children and mother earth. Our school is being dumb about things.
Here are a few steps GW can take to not be so dumb about things:
- Don’t attach balloons anywhere.
- Stop wasting paper by printing light-switch stickers and graphs with out proper units. You can email that shit.
- Stop making massive amounts of t-shirts for green move in. We don’t need them.
- Encourage businesses on GW-owned property to stop using and distributing plastic bags.
- Understand that we want to help. Not everything needs to be a beautifully designed advertising bonanza.
Keep your chin up GW. You are on the right path. Just think about sustainability as an actual obligation and not a detriment to admissions.
And the environmental holocaust ain’t so bad anyways. I loved Wall-E!
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Comments
There was also a very serious incident involving GW Eco Challenge breaking into dorms on The Vern to put up their stickers.
The group - who claimed the SA did it - somehow received a master key, then, without warning, entered students’ rooms to place a sticker on the light switches. This not only is breaking and entering - only UPD should have a master key - but there’s a clear huge amount of things thoroughly unsettling about this, not the least of which is theft. Students complained, the Dean of Students was notified, nothing was done. The group has more than a few flaws.
Also, I noticed those lights, too, Foox. I had always wondered about that.
Personally, I’d feel better if those “sustainability” dollars were put towards financial aid and tuition reduction.
Just me, though.
Foox, the lights might take a long time to turn on & might use more power in the turning on/off process than just keeping the flow going. That’s probably not true…just saying is all…maybe?
Mike, people enter rooms all the time.
Ex: Health & Safety Inspections, FIXit requests, other things I can’t think of right now.
It might be unsettling, but it’s definitely not breaking & entering. Even outside of the fact that it’s a normal occurrence, they had a key, so it’s just entering.
The worst part about this whole thing is that the university is attempting to put the entirety of the task of “greening” (how gross) ourselves in the laps of the students.
It’s definitely important for the campus to embrace the concept of “greening” (ugh), but that doesn’t mean The GWU should just put up stickers and hand us graphs — or email us graphs and posters, for that matter — without changing the university’s operating schema and its absurd expenditures — both environmental and monetary.
“Let’s make it a competition between residence halls!!” is synonymous to “Let’s not do anything and blame students if they don’t make us look better!!”
It takes more than silly prizes to change one’s carbon footprint, GWU.
About the lights, it’s been brought up before to the University, they mentioned the reasoning had to do with safety at night, and also as kirk noted the fact that turning it off used more power then just leaving it on the whole night.
It seems though quite flawed when we are “going green” and a whole building is illuminated in the middle of campus all night.
Turning off/turning back on the lights uses more energy if you’re doing it a few times a day, like turning a kitchen light on and off if you’re constantly in and out. As for safety… it’s not like anyone is wandering around up there after hours, and they don’t exactly light up the street.
I’m sure it’s not an unbelievable waste of energy, but it’s still silly.
We’re missing the big picture here, people. Travis Helwig hates balloons and he is using this post to further his anti-balloon agenda.
“Don’t attach balloons anywhere.”
You sick bastard.
Travis should be ashamed of this article. Let’s go down the list:
The article referenced citing GW’s horrendous record was a poorly researched effort by the Hatchet. The Sierra Club relied on old information from a former student to base its decision - the Hatchet made no effort to publicize the corrections it was given. However a week later it published an article noting significant improvement in GW’s environmental efforts (”University sustainability grade improves”).
Travis makes the argument to not use balloons because of their “un-green” nature. Had he looked closely at the balloons he would have seen that they were biodegradable and tied to the recycling cans with cotton twine. Additionally, someone from facilities management went and collected the deflated balloons and twine before the escaped with passing children.
Similar to the balloons, Travis dislikes the Eco-Challenge stickers and progress reports. I’ll answer this one with a question. Travis, how do you expect to increase awareness and student interest in recycling and conservation when students clearly have demonstrated minimal interest or concern? Look at our recycling numbers, look at the results for the first period of Eco-Challenge, go to a Green GW meeting and look at turn out. Please tell me, the school, Green GW how to effectively advertise and generate sustained interest without flooding students inboxes with Infomail they will never open and websites they will never visit.
Your last comment about encouraging businesses on GW property is well intentioned, but please, tell GW how to renegotiate its contracts with these companies to develop the leverage needed to carry out such demands.
Lastly, to anyone who thinks the power surge necessary to turn on lights regularly results in wasted energy, please do some research (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=turn-fluorescent-lights-off-when-you-leave-room).
I live in Ivory. My window faces the Lerner gym, meaning I can see the basketball court floors easily.
They leave those huge lights on all night. 24/7. For no reason. The gym is closed probably about 9-10 out of 24 hours in a day, and they just leave those enormous nergy-guzzlers that could light up a two-block radius running.
LET’S GO GREEN ALRIGHT YEAH!