Many participants were shocked to learn that they preferred certain types to others – though it was especially nice to see that many more people preferred the tap and filtered-tap water over bottled water. Even those who did prefer the bottled variety were shocked to learn the environmental and health dangers of drinking bottled water, and were excited and enthused to find out the benefits of filters and reusable bottles, especially when they learned about the new filling stations in Schine and Bird Library.Congrats to the Sustainability Club for an incredibly successful and informative event!

These filling stations are a bigger deal than one may realize. Up until they were put in, there was only one filling station on campus, in Archbold Gymnasium. With these stations installed, it is now significantly more convenient for students on campus to live a sustainable lifestyle by switching over to reusable bottles and ending their use of plastic bottles. Not sure why plastic bottles are a problem? Check out this old post.

In case you were wondering:

• Why Bird and Schine? These are two of the most highly trafficked areas on campus. It just makes sense to put these filling stations in the areas where people are most likely to use them. The station in Bird has had especially high traffic because many students have taken to the idea of being able to refill their bottles instead of hurting the environment and their wallet every time they’re thirsty during study sessions.
• Why not just use a water fountain? First of all, think about it: Isn’t it always a royal pain to try and fill a water bottle from a water fountain? Just in terms of plain convenience , the bottle filling stations, which shoot the water straight down into your bottle, are significantly better and more efficient. Additionally, they are significantly more sanitary, since the water is filled from a different nozzle that no one drinks from!

DOT (Do One Thing) On Campus is an initiative of SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise), a Whitman School of Management organization, and is focused on having students, faculty, staff, and Syracuse residents pledge a personal DOT – something sustainable that they pledge to do and to keep doing. Participants can register their DOTs online to add them to a registry of pledges.

But DOT doesn’t stop there. Today, at the Syracuse-UConn game, they’ve taken their initiative to the next level. Using iPads like the one above, they’re asking people to make a pledge right here, right now. But the biggest attraction, and the one that inspired today’s #DunkTheHuskies official game hashtag, is the dunk tank. For a small donation towards sustainability efforts, game attendees can purchase chances to dunk a volunteer decked out in UConn garb – a brilliant plan if I may add.

For clarification, I’m not personally a part of DOT (I made a pledge, of course) but I absolutely love what these guys do. It’s exactly what I support – small, simple, unintrusive things that make a huge impact in this world.

On one final note, GO ORANGE!!

Edit 2/13/12: Check out the article in the Daily Orange.

Traditionally eaten fruits and nuts, being purchased locally this year.

Many consider Tu B’Shvat to be the Jewish equivalent of Arbor Day or Earth Dat – A day to celebrate the gifts of the Earth, the beauty of nature, and everything else about the environment. So for this year’s tradition Tu B’Shvat Seder (traditional Jewish meal/service), I’ve worked with the Syracuse University Hillel to make a Tu B’Shvat that’s truly in the spirit of the holiday.

So what’s being done?

• The seder/meal is going to be 100% waste free
  • All food waste will be composted
  • Compostable plates, napkins, and cups will be used
  • Corn-based (and therefore biodegradable) silverware will be used
  • Soda cans/wine bottles will be recycled
  • Pans/tins for serving will be rinsed and reused
• The food is locally produced
  • The meal itself is locally grown/raised food
  • The seder, which requires a wide variety of fruits, are being bought from within the United States and as locally as physically possible
  • All meals are being prepared on site

In addition, students are being encouraged to walk or take public transport to the event.

Questions? Comment? Concerns? Let me know!

Earlier this month, I was officially nominated for the “America’s Next Eco-Star” competition, sponsored by SmartPower. In just 4 days of voting, I’m already in the #3 spot! However, I need to stay in the top 10 until February 29th, so I still could use all of the support you all can muster!

Don’t have a clue what I’m talking about? Find out all about the contest here. Ready to vote? Click here.

So why was I nominated? For a large part, because of the support those of you who read this blog have shown! Here’s what the nomination says:

Zach is a Syracuse University Freshman Honors Student and Coronat Scholar. He is currently studying International Relations, Policy Studies, and Energy and its Impacts.

Zach is looking for ways to make a change in this world, starting by creating a place to share what’s being done to improve sustainability on SU’s campus, in New York State, throughout the country, and all over the world through his blog, Being Green in a Sea of Orange - http://greeninaseaoforange.wordpress.com/.

Zach is also an intern for the Sustainability Division at Syracuse University, and spent his winter break interning at a renewable energy systems company. He is currently the secretary for the newly formed student sustainability group on campus. He also took it upon himself to update all the recycling rooms in his residence hall with the new recycling poster created for Syracuse University.

Whenever a volunteer is needed for a sustainable activity or event, Zach is usually the first to volunteer. One of his goals is to “disprove the belief that sustainability is difficult and requires sacrifices, and to prove that there is no such thing as making too small of a difference.”

To learn more about Zach, visit his blog and see how passionate he is about sustainability.

Thank you all so much for your support, and keep spreading the word!!

Super Bowl XLVI: Greening Efforts To Reduce Environmental Impact.

1. Reduce. Order things like chips and catered food in bulk. One larger package creates significantly less waste than a bunch of smaller ones. Of course, don’t over order either, because no one wants food to go to waste. If you do have food leftover, however, look online to find the local organization nearest to you that’s doing the yearly collection of Super Bowl leftovers to bring to the needy (Its a real thing, trust me).
2. Reuse. Be conscious of what you serve your food in. Tins for wings and other catered foods can be rinsed and reused. Take those snacks you bought in bulk and serve them in reusable plastic bowls. Try to avoid paper plates and cups (unless of course they’re compostable types) and serve on reusable dishes instead. Don’t want your fine china and crystal covered in buffalo sauce and blue cheese? Invest in some washable plastic plates and cups – they’re pretty cheep and will save you and the environment tons in the long run.
3. Recycle. What goes best with football? Beer of course! Canned or bottled, make sure you recycle the containers! Having a more family-friendly party? Take your soda/juice bottles and cans, and recycle those too. Most states will also give you a rebate for cans and bottles, so make sure to bring them to your local reverse-vending center for some extra cash back.
4. Compost. You might think that it’s too cold to be composting, but no matter which groundhog you believe, Spring is on its way. Help reduce the waste from your party by composting uneaten vegetables, fruits, nuts, and food scrap. In addition, try to find plates and cups without plastic coatings, and silverware made from corn-based products – that way, everything you use is compostable! Need some tips on keeping that compost going in the winter? Check out this article.
5. Save Energy. Turn down the heat during your party. When you mix body heat from the crowd that has invaded your home,with jumping and cheering for a favorite team and sweating nervously while you pray the kicker doesn’t pull a Cundiff, douse it in plenty of beer and top it off with just a hint of hot sauce, there’s a pretty good chance that no one will really mind having the thermostat set a few degrees lower.

Oh, and one more thing. GO GIANTS!!!

The original article is written entirely in Spanish, which can be found here; for an English translation, click here.

Eduardo Subirats, the author, argues a very controversial but intriguing point. He claims that natural disasters are not “natural” in the sense that they are not random acts of nature, but caused by government and business negligence. More so, he argues that they are often horribly worsened by government inaction or ineffectiveness.

Again, just wanted to get these ideas out there. Personally, while I don’t agree with most of his points, he does bring up an important issue when he discusses the role of government. It really couldn’t hurt to improve our disaster prevention and aid responses, could it?

I thought for a second. $1,092 is quite a large amount of money to spend on just one product. And then, as I thought deeper, I started to raise questions and so my research began. Here’s what I found out about that $1,092:

The average price for brewed coffee is $1.38. To make things simpler, let’s assume that all Americans buy brewed coffee, and always at that average price. What that leads us to figure out is that the average American drinks about 770 cups of coffee a year, or about two per day.

With so much coffee being drunk each day, there must be some sort of environmental impact, right? Well, since we’re assuming that each of these cups is bought, that’s about 770 cardboard or paper cups being used per person per year, for coffee alone. Since most of these cups have plastic coatings, recycling or composting is out of the question. So what kind of impact do these cups make?

The average CO2 emissions for a 16 oz cup w/sleeve, when factoring in the manufacturing and shipping processes, is equivalent to about .11 kg per cup w/sleeve. Multiply that by the number of cups each American drinks, and that’s an emission of 84.7 kg per person per year, just from coffee cups. With over 50% of the approximately 218 million American citizens over 18 years old drinking coffee daily, that’s 9.232 x 10^9 kg of CO2 emissions yearly. And that’s just the cups.

So what about the coffee itself? We spend over $4 Billion annually as Americans to import coffee from around the world, amounting to about 1.394 x 10^9 kg of coffee per year. Add in the fact that we re-export over 2.8 million kg of that coffee, and we’re causing a lot of damage. Take into consideration this chart from timeforchange.org, which displays the grams of CO2 emitted per metric ton of freight per km of transport:

To make the calculation simpler, lets assume an even split between air planes and ships, since the top ten countries we import from (Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Mexico, India, Guatemala, Cote d’Ivoire and Uganda) would generally be sending their product by these methods. Taking an average, we can say that it costs about 270 g or .27 kg of CO2 per metric ton of freight per km of shipping. So taking this further, based on a weighted average weight of exports and distance from NYC (a coffee drinking, highly populated seaport that can serve as an estimated location), this comes out to a rough estimate of 1.12 x 10^10 kg of CO2 emissions just from transporting coffee to America each year.

Between the coffee and the cups, this habit causes 2.0432 x 10^10 kg of CO2 each year. And this is before we consider the emissions from the water transport and heating, not to mention the costs of sugar, milk, stirrers or spoons, and all of the other things that go into a good cup of coffee. And then of course one could look into fair trade, and how this has affected the ecosystems of the world, and dozens of other environmental effects.

So what can we take from this? Of course, these numbers are by no means perfectly accurate. However, take this as a rough estimate to understand the magnitude of environmental damage such a seemingly minor thing can cause. Your two daily cups of coffee can add to the tens of billions of kilograms of CO2 released – that’s no longer such a small number.

The initial reaction I’m sure many people would have to this data is to try to ban coffee, or to personally give it up to try to make a difference. Think about this though: If one person gave up coffee for a year, it would only change the amount of CO2 emissions by only 1 10-millionth of a percent. Plus, the people who would give up coffee would be giving up something they love, or potentially even need. But consider this instead: If every person in America drank from reusable cups, that would cut CO2 emissions in half – and wouldn’t destroy the economies of coffee producing nations, nor would anyone have to give up a favorite habit

I hope this was as eye-opening to you all as it was to me. It’s incredible to think about the magnitude in which seemingly simple things can affect our planet. I hope you all stop to consider this, and other similar concepts as you go through your day to day lives. Leave some feedback!

Special thanks to www.e-importz.com!