Green Tips for College

Hello beautiful friends!
As this semester comes to a close, I wanted to take some time to give you some ideas on how to make next semester a little greener (environmentally speaking). There are a few things most of us already do that reduce waste, but there are a few things we can still do to continue to decrease the amount of waste we produce in college.
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Take Digital Notes
Instead of having a notebook for each class, use a laptop, tablet or even your phone to take notes. This reduces the amount of plastic and paper used during those 15 weeks of classes and note taking. A huge plus to this is that you can pretty much access your notes anywhere if you saved them on a cloud option. I love being able to access OneNote from anywhere. This saves me so much time and trouble as well as makes my back-pack lighter. I know there are so classes that still make you them notes by hand, but reduce waste where you can.

Use Reusable Coffee Cups
The best part about being in Bauer is that we have a Starbucks in one of our buildings. I tend to go visit it several times a week, and so do many other students. One of the great things Starbucks does is allows you to bring your own cup! They also give you a 10-cent discount (Which could be larger in my opinion, but oh well). This helps save on cups and plastic lids that ultimately end up in landfills. Sometimes I forget to bring my cup, but I try to when I know I am going to go get coffee.

Carpool
I am pretty sure every college has this problem where their parking thinks it is a great idea to over sell parking passes. Carpooling is not only good for the environment, but it can help reduce the parking overflow on campus. The less cars coming to campus the better it will be for everyone! Because let’s be real, parking sucks.

Recycle When You Can
A lot of colleges make an effort to give students the option to recycle, so when it is an option place your recyclable waste in the recycling bin!

Only Charge When Needed
This is a problem I have, not going to lie. I tend to leave my laptop or phone plugged in for the sake of keeping it plugged in. This waste so much energy. By removing your laptop from the charger once it is fully charged you save a lot of energy waste. This is one I struggle with because I am especially lazy and tend to just shut my laptop and leave it, but small changes like this can make a huge impact in our environment.
 
I know you aren’t ready to prepare for next semester yet, but these are just some tips to keep in mind when that time comes. Now good luck on the remainder of your finals and get some well deserved rest over winter break so you can slay your next semester!
Love Always,
Mikala