The Green Ideas competition is new to campus this year and was put forth by the Campus Sustainability Committee. This year, the winner was Erika Takeo ’13.
“The idea behind the competition was to allow everyone on campus to take ownership and responsibility of thinking of ways to make campus practices more sustainable,” said Susan Clayton, co-chair of Environmental Studies and Campus Sustainability Committee.
Takeo, a member of Greenhouse, submitted her idea with visiting professor† of Environmental Studies, Matthew Mariola after discovering a similar program at Denison University.
“Earlier this semester, members of Greenhouse and I went to a conference about campus sustainability at Denison. One of the lectures was about student projects, and one girl at Denison had done this project where they had students go to unoccupied rooms on campus and turn off lights,” said Takeo. “After counting the number of rooms and compiling data, they eventually found that if they did that the whole academic year, they would save the school over $200,000. Professor Mariola and I were amazed by this, so we decided to submit a proposal to the Green Ideas competition here.”
“Last summer, WooCorps students took an inventory of all of the lightbulbs on the campus, but interestingly they didn’t track the wattage of these light bulbs,” added Mariola. “So we thought this would be a great way to combine the Denison idea and WooCorps work.”
Takeo’s project is currently in progress. She and Mariola have started to catalogue light switches to see which switches turned on which lights.
“We want to start by figuring out how many watts each light switch costs,” said Takeo. “But we’re only looking at public places for now. For example, when I went into Severance, I checked every room except for I.S. carrels and professor’s offices.”
Takeo, with Mariola’s supervision, has taken data from Severance and Taylor Halls, and plans to finish one more academic building before the end of the year. From there, Takeo will begin cost calculations.
“What we plan to do in the end is label each light switch with a sticker that says something like ëthis light switch uses X watts of energy, please keep it turned off when not in use!’ I’m sure we’ll find we can save a lot of money once the academic buildings aren’t leaving lights on 24/7.”
“Our hope is that this project will result in increased awareness of energy use on campus,” said Mariola. “And we’ve received plenty of positive feedback. Everyone seems to think it’s a great idea, which has been very rewarding. You almost get the feeling people wish it was done before. It’s an idea whose time has come.”
Clayton said that although the competition is over, CSC is still accepting proposals for green ideas.
“The Campus Sustainability Committee was impressed by the range of ideas and the effort that was put into proposals,” said Clayton. “We hope that we’ll be able to run the competition next year and we welcome further ideas year round.”