Our questions measure current behaviors what about new?

The questions that we wrote in class were designed to measure current behavior.  My question is what about encouraging new behaviors and the acceptability of new sustainability measures?   

Other college and sustainability websites suggest that the change to plastic bottles for beverages consumes milions of barrels of oil in production and they are less likely to be recycled than aluminum cans.  Currently over 17 million barrels of oil are needed just to produce bottles for bottled water, not including transportation.  The process of bottling water produces 2.5 million plus tons of carbon dioxide.  A good way to reverse that trend would be for universities to encourage students to bring their own containers.  What if instead of bottled water there were machines that would dispense filtered water into a bring-it-yourself container?  You would drop 50 cents or whatever into the machine, put your cup under the dispenser and voila...good tasting water.  

Some schools are reducing the use of disposable cups. Campus food service areas provide cheap refill prices for beverages and have eliminated disposable cups in residence hall cafeterias.  If a student wants to take a beverage outside of the cafeteria they bring their own cups. In a school with 17,000 students the school can save about $30,000.

Another suggestion was to replace paper towels with the hand blow dryers that many airports and restaurants have adopted.  While paper does decompose paper towels are not recycled and so many trees are cut down to create these paper towels. 

There have been many articles published on the need to properly recycle batteries.  However, other than car batteries it is difficult to find places to drop off used batteries.  This would be a great program to offer on campus. 

Almost every college student I see on campus has a cell phone.  Two American teenagers developed a program to recycle cell phones and use the money to purchase phone cards for our soldiers overseas.  It would be great for the campus to support this program.  Maybe the ROTC could adopt it.  All that is needed is drop-off containers as the organization Cell Phones for Soldiers pays postage. Take a look at http://www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com/.

Another idea would be to encourage student groups to promote sustainablity and recycling on campus by developing educational campaigns.  If students haven't learned good recycling habits already, college is a great place to instill those values. 

Lastly, some schools have an annual yard sale on campus for campus residents to sell off unwanted belongings.  The left overs are then donated to local charities.  This helps charities and keeps usuable items out of the landfills.

Topics for Survey items

Dr. Denny suggested that our survey be designed to measure students behaviors towards sustainability in four areas:

• Transportation
• Recycling/Reusing/Reducing
• Energy/water/Resource use
• Food and Diet

Other ideas were to measure perceptions of University support for sustainability, reasons for non-green behavior, attitudes and beliefs about the importance of sustainability, and knowledge about sustainability.

For those who are designing questions on Food and Diet they may want to look at the energy cost of our current food distribution system.  What is the energy cost of grapes imported from Chile, raspberries from Costa Rica....etc?  Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable & Miracle can provide some ideas on this topic. 

Update from Dr. Denny

On Friday, I had a chance meeting with Danny Pugh, Vice Provost and Dean of Students, and asked him about the survey. I was concerned that our doing the survey could lead people to believe the policy was getting ready to change and that could have a negative impact on enrollments next fall. Dean Pugh said that as long as we made it clear it was a class project there would be no problem, but he also suggested that such a driving ban was not likely to happen. He said that earlier, maybe 10 years ago, a similar ban was suggested and it got a strong "push-back" from state legislators. Also he said that part of the indebtedness on the new parking decks assumed that freshmen would be paying to park there.

So, I called Nick Brown back and suggested a more general survey of UA students that examined a variety of sustainability behaviors including transportation, recycling, and energy use. He liked the idea, so we'll move that direction.

I googled "Student Survey Sustainability" and got a lot of hits (about 227,000). My first hit was for a survey done at St. Andrew's in the UK that illustrates the types of questions we could ask, including comparisons by year in school (p. 3):  http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/media/Findings%20of%20Student%20Sustainability%20Survey.pdf

So for tonight's class, think about other general areas of sustainability where we might survey students at the U of A about their current behaviors. Transportation, recycling, and energy use were the areas that came immediately to my mind. Do you have other areas?

Topic

Our survey topic is would banning freshmen from bringing cars to campus have a positive effect on reducing traffic congestion on campus without reducing enrollment and income from student housing?

Or could the University's carbon footprint be reduced by freshmen having to pay-as-you-exit, have remote park-and-ride requirements, limited access policies (freshman can bring cars but not access during weekdays), zip cards, bicycling incentives, carpool incentives)?

Questions to explore include:
1) How many freshmen actually bring a car to campus?
2) Among the colleges that have this ban, how many freshmen bring a car despite the ban?
3) How much to freshmen actually drive since some have cars and others do not?
4) How would a ban affect enrollment?
5) How would a ban affect income from University Housing?
6) How much more would parents and frends drive if freshmen were banned from driving?

In class we discussed what the survey sample should look like: High school seniors, current freshmen, current sophomores

Issues that were raised included: Would the ban be applied to non-traditional students or commuters?