Personal ways to reduce waste

Last week, I performed an experiment. I guess this isn't so surprising given my B.S.E. status, but this one was actually sort of relevant to the student population at large. It's not going to change your life (unless you decide so), but I think it's important for you to know about it anyway. For an entire week, I used the same Frist Styrofoam cup (you know, the white ones they have in the Food Gallery and Café Vivian) for almost all my drinks (I forgot it at two meals where I actually drank something). I'm not really sure where I got the idea, but given the enormous quantity of these cups the University must use, especially with the guess that most students who use them visit Frist most days and thus use several in a week, is frightening. Styrofoam takes hundreds of years, maybe even thousands, to decay, and I think it's a shame that we should be contributing to this mess.

Here is where people say, "Yeah, it is a shame, but using the same cup for a week is just gross." And I guess they'd be partially right. Yet, most of us did participate in Outdoor Action as pre-frosh. Why were we willing to deal with this grossness that first week, when we all brought only one cup and never properly washed it (and used the cup for water that had visible chunks of who knows what floating in it). I washed my cup, not with soap, but with water after each meal, and I didn't get sick all week. Remember, that there's no such thing as a germ-free environment, and my body was more than capable of handling whatever stuff my cup did pick up during the week. Now, I don't intend to advocate any specific policy that should be enacted regarding this cup issue. I just think that, given the number of cups many students must use each week, both at Frist and in their dining halls or eating clubs, there would be a significant reduction in University waste if we all just stuck to one cup, preferably something not disposable, like a Frist mug. We'd save a lot on dish-washer electricity, soap, and trash. Can you really argue against that?

This is just one specific example of the larger question that I think should occupy our thoughts often. How can any of us lead a blameless life? And if we can't live completely blamelessly, how can we at least minimize our impact as much as is reasonably possible?

I think it starts with looking at our own habits and cutting back on wasteful practices, like using several cups in one day. From now on, when you're going to get a second drink, why not carry your glass back and refill it? I know, it's not the "proper" thing to do, but we're in college. If we can't be a little eccentric now, when will it ever be appropriate? I've got a couple of other ideas that we could institute as individuals or small groups that wouldn't be impractical and would save waste (financial, energy, materials). First, I would suggest using all the backs of old reports (even if you want to save them), university notices (like those Firestone late book notices that are one sided), etc for scrap paper, and then recycling them. Also, we could consider hanging clotheslines outside the dorms whenever the weather is above freezing. Clothing dryers are the highest energy consumer of all the appliances we use on a regular basis.

I really don't care if you think these measures are crazy. The fact is that they simply require a certain amount of discipline/minimal inconvenience to make a big difference in the amount of waste the University community creates as a whole. We're supposed to be the new generation; we're too young to already feel that something's too hard or too time consuming for us to save the environment in a small way (yeah it sounds cheesy, but those are the hopes and ideas we were supposedly raised with).

There are plenty of institutional policies at Princeton that are also big problems. The silly Tiger Tram (is that what it's even called?) that runs up and down campus all day is virtually pointless. The dorms are completely heated and operational for the three weeks of winter break during which virtually all the student body is away (as opposed to every other college for which I know the policy where dorms are either just locked or at least kept at much lower but still livable temperatures). Sure, we do use some energy saving techniques like keeping the lights in the book aisles off in the bowels of Firestone and reusing those large envelopes, but that's not nearly enough. Someone could probably write a book about ways the institutional policies could be modified to reduce waste, and we should care about this too. However, it's even more important for us to take personal responsibility. Every student here can reduce his waste by his own actions, and there's no excuse for anyone not to do so. Aileen Ann Nielsen is from Upper Black Eddy, Penn. She can be reached at anielsen@princeton.edu.