Author: Drew Jaffe
Amid calls to push Occidental toward a more sustainable future, students in the Urban and Environmental Policy (UEP) department have spearheaded the school’s first campus-wide conservation challenge. The competition pits residence halls against each other to see which hall can reduce its water and energy consumption the most.
Efforts to implement the event came about after UEP major Lila Singer-Berk (senior) conducted summer research on sustainability at Occidental. From her research, she developed several recommendations to make campus more ecologically friendly.
Singer-Berk also incorporated her findings into her UEP class called “Sustainable Oxy: Campus Greening,” co-taught with biology major Grace Bender (junior) under the advisory of UEP professor Robert Gottlieb. The class focuses on three main themes as they pertain to sustainability: water, transportation and energy.
According to Singer-Berk, a campus-wide conservation challenge conveniently tied into the class’s themes of water and energy. Singer-Berk and Bender assigned each student to serve as a “green ambassador” to a residence hall. As green ambassadors, students inform and advise residents about the challenge and ways they can reduce unsustainable consumption.
The current conservation challenge started Oct. 21 and will end Nov. 5. However, the data from the weekend (Oct. 26 and 27) will be omitted due to the flooding and water shutdown in several residential halls. Singer-Berk, Bender and Sorrell encourage people to turn off lights in unoccupied rooms, unplug appliances when they are not in use, take shorter showers and not run the faucet while brushing teeth or shaving.
All residence halls on campus are involved in the competition with the exception of Pet House, Food Justice House, and Berkus House. Although this involves monitoring 11 residence halls, Bender said that a tracking system already exists for this purpose.
“We’re really excited to be using the monitoring system…which is a $700,000 investment that hasn’t been used to its full capacity. So now we have an opportunity to look a the data and really make a difference with it,” Bender said.
The system measures total energy and water consumption for each hall as well as day-to-day consumption. Bender, Singer-Berk and as Sustainability Coordinator Emma Sorrell ’13 will then calculate the total percentage reduction in consumption for each hall to determine the winner.
Through this competition, Bender, Singer-Berk and Sorrell hope to raise awareness about the issue of energy and water usage on campus.
“The nice thing about this program is that it engages the entire campus and is a really measurable way to make a difference, so we can offer incentives for students to think about ways they are being wasteful,” Bender said.
This incentive comes in the form of a $500 prize toward new hall furniture and catered dinner to the hall that reduces its consumption by the greatest percentage. However, the real prize, according to Sorell, is the greater cognizance of consumption and wastefulness.
“We use an enormous amount of water and power…As a college—and this is what’s so important—working to reduce our overall consumption…is what’s really important, to make us a more conscious citizen of L.A.,” Sorell said.
Although only a community of around 3,000 students, faculty and staff, Occidental used upwards of 64 million gallons of water in 2012, according to Sorell. Statistics on energy consumption are currently unavailable.
Despite the two-week span of the challenge, similar events on other college campuses display promising results. Oberlin College managed to reduce its electricity consumption by 32 percent while Rice University saved more than $15,000 in utility bills during its one-month challenge. If Occidental can match these successes, Singer-Berk and Bender hope to organize another conservation challenge in the spring as part of the Campus Conservation Nationals, a nationwide effort to curb consumption through inter-school competition.
The two students also hope that Occidental will eventually install other monitoring systems to track other forms of waste, such as trash and recycling. Students interested in more information on the program can visit the Conservation Challenge Facebook page.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
