MiddBriefs

Author: Stephanie Joyce, Ian Trombulak, Adam Schaffer, and Tess Russell

COLLEGE KEEPS UP WITH CURRENT PRINTING TRENDS

Even printing has a taken on a distinctly green hue in recent years as Middlebury has kept pace with the national trend, switching to 100 percent post-consumer waste paper in most publications, reducing printed publications and encouraging recycling. Even so, the limited oversight of publications on campus leaves the choice to 'go green' or not print at all largely up to the individual.

Steve Goodman, manager of Reprographics, the on-campus printer, estimates that roughly 25,000 pages get printed for College purposes every day. Programs, sports schedules, event fliers, alumni newsletters, yearbooks and directories are just some of the daily printing projects at Middlebury.

Reprographics designer Lyn DeGraff noted the importance of using environmentally friendly papers, inks and printing practices, but was quick to point out that cost plays a major role in decisions about printing. "Often it's more expensive to be environmentally friendly, so it requires cutting back on quantity to compensate," she said.

Sometimes though, all that is required is innovation. In an effort to be both sustainable and cost-effective, The Center for Campus Activities and Leadership (CCAL) has ceased their bi-annual mailing of student fundraising projects, opting instead to send a postcard inviting parents to a Web site. Other publications, such as New Faces and the Winter Term Workshop catalog have simply been reduced in number and target only specific groups.

The alternative, of course, is not to print at all. Director of Communications Maggie Paine stressed the importance of thinking before printing. "How do you get the right message to the right people at the right time?" she asked. "That's how we can be good stewards of the College's mission and money."

COUNT PAPER PROVES COST-EFFECTIVE AND ECO-FRIENDLY

The College's most noticeable effort to increase environmental friendliness may be the biomass gasification boiler next to the McCullough Student Center, but smaller initiatives such as Count Paper are aiding the cause as well. The initiative, which began last year in the form of e-mail notifications to all students reporting their individual paper consumption from networked printers, aims to cut paper waste in half.

The basic idea of the Count Paper initiative is to remind students that every sheet counts. It will not restrict your paper use - rather, it will tell you the exact number of sheets you have used. Carol Peddie of Library and Information Services undertook the challenge following a charge by the environmental council on campus to address the paper waste on campus.

Though the initiative began with the environment in mind, the increasingly bleak state of the economy now gives the initiative the dual purpose of being a vital cost cutter as well. If the College can reduce the amount of paper it wastes by half through initiatives like Count Paper, as well as an increased level of encouragement to print on both sides of a sheet, it will reduce the budgetary stress and allow the College to focus its resources elsewhere. Unlike the biomass gasification boiler, the Count Paper initiative does not come at any cost; instead, it serves to reduce cost in addition to promoting eco-friendly behavior, getting us that much closer to the goal of carbon neutrality by 2016.

GREEN ORIENTATION DRAWS MIXED REVIEWS FROM STUDENTS

Ranked as the number one "school that gets it" by the Sierra Club for its environmental initiatives, the College has extended its stewardship to educate students and staff on maximizing campus sustainability. The effects of such programs, however, remain in question.

All residential life staff were required to undergo a 45 minute session to help them to "better understand the issues and priorities and practices of sustainability at Middlebury and to be better able to communicate with students about the topic," explained Sustainability Integration Director Jack Byrne in an e-mail.

Reflecting on the experience, however, many were left without useful knowledge.

"All I remember is that we should unplug our computers when we're not using them and use energy saving lighting, and then I fell asleep," said Will James '10, a First-Year Counselor (FYC) in Ross.

Also remembering many students nodding off during the program, fellow FYC Emmy Burleigh '10 felt that the experience failed to connect environmental sustainability practices to her job as an FYC.

"It didn't relate at all back to what our job was, and the point of our training … was to be prepared for our job for this year," she said. "It was not relevant at all."

During a recent review of programs undertaken by residential life staff, Burleigh recalled this environmental program as one that many FYCs believed to have failed to educate them for their work ahead.

Byrne, for his part, now gives a new employee orientation to help people joining the College community integrate sustainability into their work with the College.

The College also attempted to include first-year students in the process. Each incoming student was sent a welcome letter encouraging the use of public transportation, recycling and energy conservation.

Nina Wright '12 said that although she does not remember this mailing or receiving specific guidance from her FYCs about how to be more environmentally friendly, "there still is an overall atmosphere of environmentalism on campus."

FOOTPRINT CALCULATOR SITE DEMYSTIFIES CARBON STATS

As Middlebury students, we are certainly conscious of our carbon footprints and cognizant of small steps we can take to reduce the impact that we have on climate change. Still, it can be hard to grasp the weight of our personal carbon contributions when faced with intangible metric measurements. With that in mind, the Global Footprint Network (GFN), a nonprofit organization which cooperates with various campaigns and initiatives to work towards a sustainable future, has created an interactive "footprint calculator," located at www.footprintcalculator.org.

Unlike other carbon quizzes, the GFN's calculator is easy to use and couches emissions in easily relatable terms, showing as a final result how many "earths" it takes to support each of our lifestyles. To start, participants are enabled to choose from a range of wacky hairstyles and outfit choices to create their own avatars, whom they will follow through a series of questions.

The first query deals with dietary habits - specifically, we are asked how often we consume animal-based products, how much of our food is processed and where the majority of our food comes from - and respondents can elect to provide a few "basic" answers or, alternatively, multiple "detailed" answers. Subsequent questions deal with our recycling habits, our usage of electricity, the size and structure of our homes and our travel patterns via public transportation, car, motorbike and airplane. The graphics, which show our waste literally mounting up on our computer screen in the form of plastic bottles, power lines and gas-guzzling automobiles, are both amusing and intentionally disturbing.

And now, the moment of truth: how many planet Earths would we need to provide enough resources for everyone to "live like me"? I will not disclose the exact amount, but I can tell you that it is not too far off that incurred by Jack Byrne, the College's director of sustainability integration, and that the "average" American uses five times (i.e., five planets worth) his or her share of Earth's resources. Perhaps the most useful aspect of the GFN calculator is that it allows users to backtrack to direct questions and see where their environmental impact is the most significant - I was doing pretty well until the air travel section. (Looks like it might be time
to find some new vacation spots.)

In addition to its personal footprint calculator, GFN's Web site allows users to compute the output produced by their businesses, cities and nations. They also provide a useful, and surprisingly comprehensible, explanation of how the equation for the "planet" figures was designed.