A new program this semester employs students for part-time jobs to promote sustainability within the residence halls as part of AU’s latest efforts to promote sustainability.
The Green Eagles program, coordinated by the Office of Sustainability, has currently hired 13 students to implement projects that educate other students about sustainability, according to Chris O’Brien, AU’s director of sustainability.
Each student employee is assigned to the residence hall where he or she lives. Larger halls, such as Letts and Anderson, receive two Green Eagle representatives, according to O’Brien.
The Green Eagles complete weekly assignments designed to encourage participation in sustainability from residence hall residents. Past assignments for the Green Eagles have included distributing a sustainability literacy survey via e-mail to every resident in their respective halls.
This survey will be distributed again at the end of the year to see if students have become more knowledgeable about sustainability, O’Brien said.
Another past assignment for the Green Eagles was to encourage students to register for the Zimride, a carpooling program that allows students to share rides.
Lindsey Breeding, a junior in the School of International Service, is the Green Eagle for Hughes Hall. Part of being a Green Eagle is setting an example for other students, Breeding said.
All the Green Eagles met earlier this year to discuss ways they could “green themselves,” according to Breeding. These included simple things such as turning off lights, taking quick showers and shopping at farmers’ markets.
“It’s like a peer-to-peer thing,” Breeding said. “It’s not like an authority figure telling students what to do. It’s someone on their level.”
In the next few weeks, the Green Eagles will work on AU’s first waste audit, according to O’Brien. During this project, the Eagles will sort through trash from the residence halls and assess what is being wasted the most. Then they will determine how this waste can be reduced and ways to change this waste into something useful.
O’Brien said this project will help AU achieve its goal of zero waste.
“In order to achieve this, we need to understand where [the waste] comes from and who produces it,” he said.
The date of this waste audit has not yet been confirmed, according to O’Brien.
The Green Eagles will also promote the Campus Conservation Nationals in November. This is the first time AU has participated in the nationwide contest to encourage students to conserve energy.
The Campus Conservation Nationals is a three-week competition during which universities compete to see which can reduce electricity and water use the most, according to the Campus Conservation Nationals website.
During the contest, the Office of Sustainability will display energy consumption on screens in the lobby of each building to show students exactly how much energy each building consumes.
The Green Eagles will also work to promote Recyclemania in the spring. Last year, AU ranked third out of 600 schools participating in the competition, according to O’Brien. He would like to see AU place first this year.
“We now have one or two people in each hall whose job is to recruit participation,” O’Brien said. “Our expectation is that they are out there promoting sustainability.”
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