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Office of Sustainability
Enhancing Educational Experiences within the Office of the Dean of the College
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Sense of Place – Material Recovery Facility Tour
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Reduce, Reuse, and…RECYCLE! The Office of Sustainability is hosting an exciting Sense of Place tour at the Material Recovery Facility. Join us on Feb. 15 at 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. during Block 5 for this exclusive, behind-the-scenes journey to explore where CC’s recycling goes after it leaves campus. You will also learn about the importance of properly recycling your waste and how recyclables find a new life after you are done with them. The deadline to register is Feb. 13 and spots are limited, so sign up soon!
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Don’t let the team’s name fool you! The Office of Sustainability’s Waste Team is an essential part of the work that we do towards creating a more sustainable campus. The team is comprised of three persevering interns: Alexa Rennie ‘23, Jasmine Sone ‘23, and Meredith Kuster ‘22, and their wonderful volunteers Valerie Xiong ‘25, Vivian Zander ‘25, and Chase Hetler ‘25. Through their work, they aim to educate the campus community on waste management with proper waste disposal methods for recyclables, compostable material, and e-waste. This work is vital for decreasing carbon emissions on campus and helping CC achieve its emissions goals. Rennie highlights how her team has “an audit coming up which will give [them] more information about how waste is being processed in the big three dorms.” After analyzing the results of the audits, Rennie hopes that the team can be more proactive with their disposal of waste. Sone wants the campus to know that “we also have a campus compost program which provides compost buckets to students interested in composting all year. We want to keep spreading the word about the e-waste program and find new ways to raise awareness about it.” Kuster appreciates that her internship with OOS allows her team to have plenty of room for creativity, as seen with the very successful Halloween Costume Exchange, which she recently spearheaded. She also likes how her internship allows students to explore personal interests, as well as learn about the existing waste programs on campus and how we can improve them.
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Do you have electronic waste to dispose? Well, the CC Office of Sustainability has a solution for you! We recycle electronic waste, including items that are no longer working, unwanted, or at the end of their life. Through E-Tech Recyclers, a local Colorado Springs e-waste business, these materials are safely and responsibly recycled. Acceptable and commonly recycled items include TVs, monitors, keyboards, cables, appliances, digital media players, cell phones, and other items. Please note we cannot recycle alkaline batteries, which include most household batteries, such as Duracell, Energizer, and others.
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Drop-Off Event at Breton Hall Garage 8 on Friday, Dec. 16
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Students who can transport their own items are invited to drop-off items from 1:30 – 3 p.m. on Dec. 16. Please refer to the map below to locate the Breton Hall Garages (northwest corner of parking lot C-1). Staff will be there to help you unload your items! Faculty and Staff who cannot attend this event can fill out this request form for a pick-up, and a representative will be in touch with you about your request within three business days.
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*Please note that if your items are both college-issued AND contain a hard drive (laptops, computers, iPads, etc..), you must reach out to ITS for them to wipe this hard drive before recycling. Additionally, a pick-up option is available ONLY for office/departmental requests. For any personal requests from CC community members and students, drop-off at the E-waste garage is the only option.*
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Sustainable Wednesdays Coming Soon
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Interested in learning more about sustainability? Come to the new pop-up events hosted by the Office of Sustainability in the Worner Campus Center on Wednesdays. These weekly events will provide students with fun and engaging ways to learn about sustainability and green living with trivia and prizes! The four themes that we will focus on this school year are: 1) Engaged Participant; 2) Waste and Food; 3) Energy; and 4) Water. We hope to see you there!
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Crucial Climate Change Summit Recap
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Sarah Hautzinger, professor and associate chair of the Anthropology Department, and Myra Jackson, mindfulness resident, recently completed a Block 3 trip with 11 CC students to the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), which was held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, from Nov. 6 to 18. Since its founding in 1995, the United Nations Climate Change Conference has fought for one main goal: to limit climate change. Hautzinger reflected, “I am struck by a number of conversations with faculty from other institutions who have been bringing students to COPs over the years. They often express frustration, related to their urgency about the negotiations – and only the negotiations – taking center stage for all students. Make no mistake: negotiations are the core. If you miss what’s achieved, like this year’s agreement on a Loss and Damage fund for developing nations reeling from climate-related disasters, you miss the crux. That said, taking students as ethnographers allowed them to find innumerable points of insertion – from finance, food systems, and climate journalism, to youth influence and the People of COP27. These also matter and are also about our collective climate responses; a group like ours can depict a fuller and more textured portrayal than one exclusively focused on the negotiations.”
For Jackson, COP27 marked her 15th climate meeting. “Attending this COP with students helped to refocus the meaning of my engagement in this space since my first COP at the Hauge in 2000. CC students participated in a COP with many historic firsts that track back to the specific engagement of youth, indigenous peoples, and grassroots movements in the midst of a polycrisis, that being when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. While the consensus agreement to create a fund to address climate-related loss and damage is headlining, my hunch is that breakthroughs muted for now, may be cited as precursors to the social transformation necessary. At top of mind, a new four-year plan for food system transformation; international cooperation to advance article 6.8 on non-market approaches vs quid pro quo emissions trading; the detailed call for transformation of International Financial Institutions will be critical for efficiently curating capital flows to address countries disparate and overlapping needs relating to mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and resilience-building; and the COP27 outcome document for the first time recognizes “the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment”; this is an invitation for national and international cooperative action to safeguard and advance that right alongside entertaining the rights of the ocean.” From all of us at the Office of Sustainability, thank you to Hautzinger, Jackson, and the 11 CC students for your commitment to combating global climate change!
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Holiday Season Sustainability Tips
Celebrate the holiday season with these sustainability tips!
- Turn your residential heaters down, but not off to protect them from freezing, and lights off before departing for break
- Find someone to take care of your houseplants
- Carpool to the airport with friends, if possible, or sign up for CC’s airport shuttles
- Fill up a reusable water bottle for your trip (after you get through TSA)
- Create handcrafted decorations rather than store-bought ones
- Offset your holiday travel (see below)
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Offset your Holiday Travel
Are you going home for Winter Break and looking to offset your travel emissions? The Office of Sustainability has an easy-to-use resource to help you reduce your carbon footprint over the holidays. Use the Travel Offset Calculator to compute your trip’s toll on the environment and then click to offset your emissions and counterbalance some of your travel impacts. The cost of offsets is far less than the cost of travel, but your investment greatly supports important climate initiatives! You can learn more about offsetting carbon emissions here.
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