New York, NY -- According to an article today on the Tufts Daily web site, students enrolled in an Experimental College (ExCollege) class have chosen paper waste as the focus of this semester. Ideally, they hope their efforts will transform Tufts into a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly campus.
The course instructor, Tina Woolston, stated that , “Tufts’ Medford/Somerville campus in 2008 bought 221,844 lbs of paper, 70 percent of which was virgin paper — paper made without any recycled content.” To put that into perspective, the paper is equivalent to 2,662 trees or 300 yds. of green space.
To achieve their goals, the class has partnered with Tufts’ Office of Sustainability as well as some other environmental groups on the campus such as Tufts Recycles! and the Tufts Institute of the Environment (TIE). To reduce paper use, the class is petitioning professors to accept papers electronically and reduce the number of handouts. They are also working on getting the default printer settings in Tisch (Library) and Eaton (ITS Technology Center) to be double-sided and reduce the amount of virgin paper bought and used.
In researching other institutions and their programs, Tufts has examined both Harvard and MIT as models for their own campus efforts. According to a student in the class, the campus has seemed receptive to the idea so far. Complicating matters slightly in terms of printing are two separate contracts currently in place that govern printing practices. For staff and faculty, two-sided printing is already the standard, but for other printers across campus where it costs money to print, the default is still single-sided.
