aCClimate Conservation Campaign

Lizzy Stephan is a sophomore at Colorado College. She is co-chair of EnAct, the college's environmental action group, an Intern in the Sustainability Office, a Campus Sustainability Council member and a collaborator on the creation and dissemination the Colorado College Sustainability Plan.  The aCClimate campaign will provide the student body with several "conservation tools," including shower timers, laundry drying racks, and Kill-a-Watt meters.

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March 31st, 2009

Conservation Tools Update:

It has been slow going at Colorado College working on our grant because we've been waiting on some green lights from college staff. We have been waiting to get information from the desk coordinators in each of the main residence halls about how many drying racks they thought they could store for students to borrow. The numbers they reported were kind of disappointing (2-3 drying racks per dorm), but at this point we are happy to start small in order to gauge whether these conservation tools will be popular with CC students....rather than spend all of our funds so quickly on something that could be less than useful. While we've been waiting, I've been enjoying the drying rack "sample" we ordered in my room--it is so much more convenient than draping my socks off of the door of the microwave!! We are grateful that we ordered these samples--we decided to test out two different drying racks but we found the color-coded "assemble yourself" rack to be just a bit too challenging for us.

So now that we have the necessary information from desk coordinators, we have ordered our "first round" of conservation tools and they should be arriving at the end of this week. While we wait, we are creating the educational materials that will accompany them--shoeboxes with a "how-to" guide for our Kill-A-Watt meters (one per major dorm so far), and small pamphlets to be tied to the laundry drying racks. Once the tools are here and are united with their educational materials, all we will have to do is drop them off at the main lobby desks in the major residential halls. Then we will have to convince the desk coordinators to tally how many students borrow these items for the rest of the semester, and of course we'll be doing some extensive advertising. We're thinking we'll decorate some laundry rooms to announce the dryer racks that will be available to students (you can't really ignore signs when they're accompanied with streamers, right??). Also, the student environmental action group is in the process of acquiring a plug and socket couples Halloween costumes for educational "performances" around campus...so we'll probably be doing a few performances of our own to promote the Kill-a-Watt meters.

The shower timers piece of our project is a bit more complicated because we can't utilize the same check-out system as we will for our other tools. We've ordered the shower timers, and are working on exploring possibilities for their permanent installation in the hallways participating in our "pilot program." Otherwise, they'd just be held up in the showers by the suction cups they came with, which doesn't seem like a great permanent solution to us. This part is going to be a bit more challenging, but we're excited to just bring the idea of water conservation into the bathrooms in a constructive manner.

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