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.