Boston University
ER-2: Student Sustainability Outreach Campaign

The University created “Join the Challenge” to engage all students, faculty, staff, and alumni in a competition to reduce their environmental footprints. The competition is between all the schools and colleges on campus. Everyone competes through carbonrally.com, which provides the monthly carbon footprint metrics and per-capita totals for each school or college’s CO2 reductions and determines the winner. Scoring is done at the end of each month and the school or college that reduces its carbon footprint the most for that month wins a prize specifically related to the month's challenge. RecycleMania is a friendly competition and benchmarking tool for college and university recycling programs to promote waste reduction in their campus communities. Over an 8 week period, from early February to early April, schools report recycling and trash data which are then ranked according to who recycles the most. Recyclemania helps highlight BU’s waste reduction achievements, and compares us to more than 600 schools nationwide.

Through "Join the Challenge" we have been able to engage 14 percent of the BU community in behavioral change activities. The campaign is open to all members of the community who can accept as many challenges as they can in order to reduce their carbon footprint. In 2010 carbonrally estimated that collectively through our sustainable actions, we reduced our CO2 emissions by 36.21 MTCO2e. During the RecycleMania competition we track our recycling progress with a large graphic placed in the student union. Compost, paper, cardboard, and bottles and cans recycling rates are tracked for each week and totaled over the 8 weeks to see how we have improved waste diversion compared to previous years.

URL where information on RecycleMania can be found: http://www.bu.edu/sustainability/what-you-can-do/events/recyclemania/