Turn Off the Lights!

In the fall semester of 2017, two Macalester students created new signs to remind other students and staff to save electricity in campus buildings. Aubrey Arnt, one of these students, wrote the piece below about her project.

In the fall semester of 2017, Ciara Moore and I, two first year students in the Sustainability and the Campus course, took it upon ourselves to revise and update the visual cues across the campus that encourage students to save energy by turning off light switches in the residence halls. For our project we designed and installed signs above light switches to encourage students to pay attention to their light usage in the dorms. These signs were placed in all residential lounges (Bigelow, GDD, Doty, Dupre, Turck, Wallace, and 30 MAC), in order to instill positive and sustainable habits in students which would hopefully follow them through their years at Macalester and beyond. The project was titled: Showing the Signs of Sustainability.

As many of us know, one of the Campus Sustainability Goals is to reach Carbon Neutrality by the year 2025. Our mission was to help our school attain this goal by using less electricity and therefore lessening our carbon footprint. Since 2009, the year the school adopted this plan, our total greenhouse gas emissions have greatly decreased from nearly 19,000 metric tons to just below 12,000. The campus has done many projects to work toward decreasing our CO2 emissions throughout the years, but few of them enact the help of Macalester students specifically. By putting up the signs and deliberately asking students to be cautious of their energy use, we allowed the student body to be a part of the mission.

Since the signs have been put up, electricity usage in the residential halls have gone down greatly.  Students have been taking notice of their behaviors and changing them to fit our goals. Facilities have also taken notice of what halls have been using less energy, and have asked the office to print more of our signs to be hung up in other places around campus. Overall, the project was a success, and we are one step closer to achieving our goal.