Creating Your Vision

What is your vision for the campus and/or community?

ECO envisions Northwestern as a leader in environmental sustainability among all institutions of higher learning. This requires a revitalization of two major components: institutional practices and campus culture. All elements of Northwestern's business operations should account for their environmental impacts and align with strong targets to reduce those impacts. A revitalization of campus culture entails invigorating conscientious stewardship of public utilities and an awareness for the broad range of environmental impacts in everyday behavior. These efforts will reduce the environmental footprint of Northwestern University and produce a cohort of environmentally conscious graduates.

Assessing Your Campus and Community

What campus/community problem does your blueprint address? What structures, practices and policies institutionalize the problem?

Our efforts combat global climate change by locally decreasing our environmental footprint. We have targeted Northwestern as a significant source of CO2 emissions, waste and energy usage. The institutional policies that impact these issues are energy procurement, waste management, building operations, construction, purchasing, landscaping and transportation. We will examining each of these systems and find cost-effective improvements to align our institution with principles of sustainability. In the near term we will focus on waste and purchasing. Success in each of the core areas of sustainability demands responsible usage of public goods such as water, waste and energy. Therefore our approach will involve not only improving policy through sound research and administrative advocacy, but also changing community behavior through educational outreach, consulting with student groups, and developing high-impact events.

What communities will you work with?

• Campus community

Setting Goals and Deliverables

• Goal 1: Purchase 'greener' paper products, cleaning supplies, and lighting fixtures.
• Convince Northwestern to join the Chicago Green Purchasing Consortium.
• Provide cost-benefit analyses and purchasing options making comparisons to our current policies.
• Establish a standard of having an Energy Star rating for all appliance and lighting purchases and 60% post-consumer materials for all paper products.
• Target specific cost-effective areas for green purchasing and secure an administrative commitment to follow our recommendations.
• Goal 2: Increase the amount of waste recycled in the dining halls, dorms, academic buildings, and outdoors.
• Improve our recycling poundage from 30% to 40% of total waste.
• Implement a safe disposal program for CFL lightbulbs and improve visibility for battery, electronics and ink cartridge disposal programs.
• Organize the Mount Trashmore event to demonstrate the magnitude of our daily waste and educate the campus on recycling alternatives.
• Conduct a waste audit to evaluate deficiencies in our recycling program.
• Goal 3: Engender responsible environmental behaviors and stewardship of public utilities among campus residences and student groups.
• Train all community assistants in ECO's Green Presentations to present during New Student Week.
• Develop a Green Handbook for student group leaders to assist with event planning, advertising and finding green vendors.
• Deliver ECO's Green Presentations to the remaining campus dorms (already delivered to eight during the previous quarter).
• Cosponsor next year's Green Cup energy competition between campus residences.

What is your primary approach? Advocacy and Activism

Why did you choose this approach?

For our policy initiatives we need to do research into our current policies and their alternatives and advocate for the strongest alternatives.

Did you have secondary approaches? What are they?

Organizing is the most potent technique for educating the student body and empowering them to take ownership of environmental ethics.

What will your tactics and activities be?

One of our primary tactics will be research. This has proven to be the most effective tool for convincing the university to change their policies. Julie Cahillane, the campus recycling coordinator, has been enthusiastic about helping us to evaluate our purchasing policies and connecting us to other resources and providers that can offer affordable alternatives. Once we have found the most cost-effective options, we will present them to the Sustainability Working Group and pass our proposals through the necessary administrative channels. Administrators have been enthusiastic about us researching purchasing because they have been looking for a group to take on this project; no one has had the time as of yet. It should therefore be fairly nonconfrontational as long as we engage the proper administrators throughout the process. We also may be confronted with different institutional priorities in terms of cost-effectiveness versus environmental benefits. We will address this if it becomes a hindrance to our proposals. Possible tactics would include leaking some of our research to campus news outlets or mobilizing our constituencies in support of our proposals. But as the process has been markedly conciliatory thus far, our tactics will reinforce our good faith working relationship with the administration.

For our student outreach, we will have three components: firesides, high-impact events, and student group outreach. Our fireside program has heretofore been an interactive presentation by ECO members. Our next stage is training other campus leaders to deliver the presentation to maximize our reach and more authentically integrate sustainability into campus culture. We have been in conversations with the directors of Residential Life to plan how to train the community assistants (CAs) in each dorm. The CAs would then be able to deliver the presentations during the first week of school to establish a dorm culture of sustainability. We also plan to co-sponsor another Green Cup competition among the dorms to reduce energy and water usage over a six-week period.

Our Mount Trashmore event will serve as a high visibility, jarring campus event that will alter campus perceptions of waste. We will collect all of the waste from each of the dorms and dining halls and place it in a large pile in the middle of campus on Earth Day (April 22) to show how much waste we collectively consume. During the day we will have music and dance groups performing to get people to come to Mount Trashmore. We will also give away mugs, canvas bags and food. Following up with educational programs and online resources, we will promote recycling alternatives to a broad population. One of our educational programs is a "carry your own trash" initiative in which we will recruit students to literally carry their trash and recycling for a week to demonstrate our individual waste contributions. The day of the event, we will have scales so students can weigh their weekly waste and recycling. We will also give participating students information on what happens to trash, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts, so that they can answer questions from curious students before the event. Our website (whathappenstotrash.com) will serve as an additional resource. We will also have fireside presentations, speakers, and theater performances to build enthusiasm for the event. This event is a natural progression from our earlier initiatives, which implemented safe disposal of batteries and ink cartridges and lobbied the administration to purchase 28 new outdoor recycling receptacles. These policy changes demand educational outreach about recycling and waste in parallel. The Mount Trashmore event is designed to do just that.

For our student handbook, we look to create a tool that provides information to student leaders about how to make their events, purchases, and publicity as sustainable as possible. In addition to doing research we plan to use surveys and build coalitions with other student groups so that we can develop a tool that can be most useful. We will place this resource in PDF form on our student government website for all student group leaders. When it is finished, we plan on reaching out to individual student groups and providing customized recommendations for their particular programming. We believe that targeting student leaders will help the culture of sustainability to filter through the greater Northwestern student body and be integrated in campuswide events.

Connecting Back to Vision

How does your strategy contribute to your vision for your campus and/or your community?

Our multidimensional strategy utilizes bottom-up organizing and top-down policy reform to create holistic change around environmental sustainability. The intersection of enlightened policy and responsible student stewardship is essential for Northwestern to become an environmental leader. When these complementary forces function in unison, Northwestern will have undergone a fundamental culture change by fully embracing environmental sustainability.

Resources and skills you will need

What skills do you need for this approach?

Web skills, best practice research, consulting and coalition building, grassroots organizing, marketing and publicity.