In order to truly love purple and live gold, LSU needs to be more green. While LSU has already started moving in the right direction, I think we can do better! Besides reducing waste and pollution, becoming a more eco-friendly campus would also save a pretty penny.
One major way LSU could improve in is reducing paper waste. Encouraging professors to use digital textbooks, have students submit papers via Moodle and making an effort to make offices “paperless” would cut down on a significant amount of annual paper waste and save on costs.
LSU could also make efforts to reduce the amount of plastic used on campus. Minimizing (or doing away with all together!) the use of plastic bags in Outtakes, Take 5, the bookstore, etc., would make a huge different. Let’s say each student uses just one plastic bag a week, 15 weeks in the semester, and the Baton Rouge campus has 30,000 students. That’s 900,000 bags a year – not counting faculty, staff or visitors. Reusable bags are inexpensive and would be awesome giveaway items for prospective and incoming students instead of sunglasses, keychains and other plastic items most people throw away after a few months.
Cutting back on our electricity usage would be a huge step – although it’s a “clean energy,” it’s usually generated by fossil fuels or coal. There’s countless ways LSU can improve here, from gadgets like the “Vending Miser” that turns off a vending machine’s lights (without turning off the cooling system) when not in use. Being careful to turn off lights in unused room is a simple way to cut back on our power bill. A huge step would be to turn off the stadium lights when not in use. As cool as Death Valley looks all light up, it’s not worth the environmental and financial drain.
An easy way to get Tigers involved would be to hold a university-wide challenge among the residence halls to see who can decrease their waste per resident the most. Last year, Laville had a similar challenge between the East and West halls, with great success. Whether it was simply being more mindful of our energy usage or the lure of glory and bragging rights, something about competition seems to get results.
Kristina Plunkett