University of South Florida (Tampa)
ER-2: Student Sustainability Outreach Campaign

Emerging Green Builders, a student group on campus, in collaboration with Physical Plant, the USF Sustainability Initiative, and USF Housing and Residential Education, hosted ConservaBull in 2008 and 2009. After 9 weeks, the residence hall that reduced its energy consumption by the largest percentage from the same previous period won a prize. Focused on raising consumption conscience, 14 residence halls participated in this event. Participants were able to track their progress online.

The baseline energy consumption for each hall was assumed to be 100, based on consumption from the same time period during the previous year. The goal was to stay as far below that baseline as possible. Each hall started at 0 and energy consumption was added to the start value on a weekly basis. As the graph on the website demonstrates, each hall that participated in the event decreased their energy consumption compared to the previous year. The savings ranged from 6% to 48% for the 14 residence halls that participated, with an average savings of 25%.

USF has two additional campaigns that meet the requirements for this credit: 1)RecycleMania is a friendly competition and benchmarking tool for college and university recycling programs to promote waste reduction activities to their campus communities. Over a 10-week period, schools report recycling and trash data which are then ranked according to who collects the largest amount of recyclables per capita, the largest amount of total recyclables, the least amount of trash per capita, or have the highest recycling rate. With each week’s reports and rankings, participating schools watch how their results fluctuate against other schools and use this to rally their campus communities to reduce and recycle more. At the University of South Florida, RecycleMania is organized by the Student Environmental Assocaition in conjunction with Physical plant and Dining Services. USF entered the “Waste Minimization” contest in RecycleMania and placed second in Florida and 25th out of 199 universities in the United States. In the “Waste Minimization” competition, schools compete to see which one produced the least amount of municipal solid waste (including both recyclables and trash) per person. USF produced 20.8 pounds per person. Please see http://recyclemaniacs.org/Index.htm, http://usfweb3.usf.edu/absoluteNM/templates/?a=2266. 2)The USF Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) Team has developed an award-winning idea for a project that would provide free reverse osmosis filtered water at popular locations around campus. A number of these water systems have been installed with the help of a grant from Walmart. The next step is to implement a Refill-a-Bull program that will provide students, faculty, and staff with reusable metal water containers at a cost of only $5.00 per container. A survey field study of the potential impact of this project indicated over 22,000 students would obtain an overall savings of $1,746,158, and save over 2,000,000 plastic bottles from being dumped into landfills each year. Also, each machine has a digital counter that tracks the number of plastic bottles saved. Please see http://usfweb3.usf.edu/absolutenm/templates/?a=1848&z=43.