Susquehanna University
EN-5: Outreach Campaign

TerraCycle recycles hard-to-recycle items like chip bags, cereal bags, and oral care supplies. Collection boxes were placed in all academic buildings, the campus center, library, gym, and first-year residence halls. Susquehanna's program began in fall 2016. Advertising for the campaign is posted on the University's intranet site, which is accessed by faculty, staff, and students. Advertising was also placed in faculty mailboxes, and is visible at each collection box site.

Since fall 2016, 8,200 granola bar wrappers, 1,868 cereal bags, and 1,307 oral care items were collected and shipped to TerraCycle.

Working with the university’s Sustainability Committee, the Office of Information Technology proposed a program to discourage wasteful printing and copying, conserve environmental resources, and control the amount of printing to avoid passing rising costs to students. Previously, all students were charged a flat fee based on rates set by the highest users and incorporated into tuition. This initiative and details around proposed managed student printing and copying were ultimately endorsed by the Sustainability Committee made up of faculty, staff and students, who then presented the proposal to the full faculty. While not voted on, the faculty broadly supported the program. The opportunity to educate students on responsible resource use and waste avoidance carried the day. The Office of Information Technology then proceeded to license and configured a print management system over the summer of 2014. In the fall of 2014 a campus wide communication campaign encompassing posters, emails, portal postings and presentations at Student Government meetings informed the community of the pending changes. Effective November 2014, the new print policy was in place. The new policy allowed the university to charge each student on a per use basis, thus shifting the real cost of printing to those students who are the highest users. Under the new policy, students who do not use printing resources no longer have pay the cost of providing printing services to everyone else. Tying usage to cost created an incentive for students to only print/copy as necessary and discourage wasteful habits.

In FY 2013, campus printers with paper supplied by IT used 2300 reams of paper (1,150,000 pages), which cost $6325. In FY 2017, this was reduced to 1024 reams (512,000 pages) and $2816.