University of Puget Sound
ER-2: Student Sustainability Outreach Campaign

For the past three years, Puget Sound has been trying different approaches to a sustainability awareness and behavior modification campaign that we've termed the Live Green Challenge to go along with our campus sustainability branding program, Loggers Live Green. While we're still evolving the program, and the program content changes year to year based on past experience and new logistical challenges presented each year, we're confident that this campaign will continue to evolve and offer a variety of outreach and participation opportunities for our campus community. In the past three years, the Live Green Challenge has included an energy reduction competition for campus residence halls and participating campus houses, tabling opportunities and wall displays, partnerships with the university bookstore and coffee shops, showings of sustainability-oriented films, tie-ins with Fair Trade Month, and more.

In the first year we conducted the Live Green Challenge on our campus (October 2008), we saw terrific efforts at energy reduction with 15 of 18 participating residence halls and Greek Houses reporting a decrease in energy usage from October of the prior year. The winning residence, a Greek house, reduced their energy consumption from October 2008 to October 2009 by a whopping 31%. The average across the 15 residential areas showed roughly 15%. In the second year we moved the competition to February 2010. In 2010, the third time we hosted the Challenge, we focused primarily on education and outreach. Because our Facilities Services Department decommissioned the central steam plant and installed highly efficient building gas heating equipment (significantly lowering energy use/carbon production)during Summer 2010, we could not stage an energy reduction competition this year. We need to gather new benchmark data to reliably continue the energy reduction competition component of the Live Green Challenge during the 2011-12 academic year.

In addition to the formal Live Green Challenge month we host each year, the Sustainability Advisory Committee's Outreach subcommittee plans awareness and outreach campaigns and events throughout the year. In addition, during the summer of 2008 we developed a campus-wide sustainability branding campaign, Loggers Live Green. This unified suite of icons and slogans allow us to identify sustainable activities and signage on campus with one of the Loggers Live Green logo components (Loggers Go Green, Loggers Cut Waste, Loggers Unplug, Loggers Save Water) to build an awareness of the volume and breadth of sustainability efforts on the university campus.