After only 4 weeks of school midterms are upon us (a downside to the quarter system). This means that students at Santa Clara are staying up later, multitasking, stressing and consuming way too much caffeine. (even as I write this I’m trying to update my tumblr and twitter, write a short paper, and plan the rest of my week so I can get everything done). 


In the beginning of the quarter only a few people would bring coffee to class, but as the quarter marched on the number of paper cups and plastics lids in all of my classes has risen dramatically. Although the coffee itself has a major environmental impact, the single use cups and lids alone are shocking. Trash cans and compost bins around campus are full of the cups. The estimates of paper coffee cups we use per day is well into the millions. According to Chris Jordan it’s over 40 million per day. 

Even though we are all rushing, we need to remember that there is always time to grab our to-go mug, and wash it afterwards (an added bonus is that your coffee/ other caffeine filled drink will stay warmer and test better longer). Just because we are stressed doesn’t mean we need to stress the environment.

I think Who Killed the Electric Car? may have been the first environmentally focused documentary I ever saw. I came home one day and my parents were watching it, and I ended up getting sucked into it as well.

The movie is about the electric cars that were available in the early ’90s before they were “killed” by the car industry. It’s an interesting look at why it has taken us so long to create viable electric cars.

We have all heard the commercials about how lowering your thermostat by a few degrees in the winter and raising it by a few degrees in the summer will save you money. So why is that during the hottest days this September I was freezing in my room?

1. For reasons unknown to me (most likely cost or concern over usability) Santa Clara University chose thermostats with no on-off, no heating/cooling option, and no way to program it for when it should come on or off.

2. My roommates are used to having a cool house year round, regardless of the temperature outside.

For a school that seems so focused on being sustainable and saving money, I cannot begin to understand why they made such a fatal mistake. They have added 138 new townhouse units — all with their own thermostat and air-conditioning system that has been working overtime the first month of school.

I didn’t realize just what a mistake Santa Clara had made until I went to turn down the AC. When I realized I couldn’t just turn it off, I decided to raise the temperature on the thermostat so it would stop cooling and turn off. I went outside for a few minutes, and when I came back inside and stood under one of the vents I was hit in the face with hot air. Turning up the temperature turned on the heating in the middle of an 85 degree day. So instead of saving energy by turning up the thermostat, I had the apartment cycling back and forth between the AC and the heater.

With 17 percent of a typical U.S. home’s energy bill coming from cooling, it’s shocking to me that so much energy and carbon would be wasted. (I am currently trying to estimate how much money the university is wasting on our AC in the new units alone. If I can finally get the numbers I need I will update with it.)

If you do have a thermostat you can control, here are some things you can do to save energy, be more sustainable, and not freeze during the summer.

Air conditioning and energy consumption tips

1. Close the windows: If you have the AC on, why let it all go outside? You can keep your AC on all day and the windows open, but the outside temperature won’t go down and your house won’t cool off either.

2. Turn the thermostat up in the summer and down in the winter: A few degrees can save a lot of money and energy without sacrificing comfort.

3. Turn off your thermostat when you aren’t home: If you can either program your thermostat or turn it off before you leave you will save the energy that would have been wasted to heat or cool your empty home all day.

4. Use cross ventilation through windows: Open up your windows in the best way to capture the cooling breeze.

5. Close the blinds during the day to block the suns heat.

6. Wear lighter clothing and work to keep yourself cool instead of bundling up in your favorite sweats on summers hottest day.

In the past two weeks my life has been so busy that I never know what day it is. My life has turned into endless “to do” lists that seem to never end. With a challenging course load, a time consuming position on the school newspaper, and trying to make time to spend with friends, roommate, and at the gym, the time I have to feed myself is limited.

Over the summer I had all of these grand ideas that I was going to cook all of my own food. Now I can’t help but laugh at the naivety of my summer self. I don’t know how I ever thought I would have time to do everything.

I am one of those people that knows what they believe in and rarely change their mind, but unfortunately I have had to question my idealistic approach to daily meals. It is nearly impossible for me to find time to cook a few days a week, let alone every day. I have finally come to terms with the fact that things won’t be the exact way that I would like them to be, and instead accept that I may have to compromise.

I hate food packaging with a fiery passion, but at this point (especially today where I am running off very little sleep after a late night at the paper) I have come to terms with the fact that I will have to eat some food that comes in packaging I despise — if I don’t I will either starve or never sleep, and neither is a valid option. Instead, I have made a new game plan:

1. Buy as many fresh fruits and vegetables as possible to eat during the week. I will also wash and prepare them as soon as I get home. I find that if I make my salad and cut up my veggies for the week I am much more likely to eat them (mostly because I can just open the fridge and start eating).

2. Buy packaged foods based on the degrees of food packaging. I still cannot allow myself to buy frozen foods in hard plastic containers, but the paper containers hurt a little less. As much as I hate all plastic, I have also had to compromise a bit and buy a few things that come in plastic bags.

3. Be sure that the ingredients inside of the packaging are what I support — organic and as local as possible.

Even though buying packed food hurts every time I put it in my basket, I had to compromise a bit to make my entire lifestyle work. Perhaps when I have a real job and I am not spending all of my waking hours working or studying I can meet my goal of cooking all of my own food. Until then, I have to find a way to make a poor situation into something positive as possible.

One of my favorite memories of my first weekend in the dorms last year was watching all of the freshmen try to figure out how to do laundry. For some reason students come to school with absolutely no knowledge of what a washing machine is or how it works. One kid’s mom came to visit for parents weekend and did more laundry for her son than I had ever seen in my life.

1. Make sure each load is completely full. There is no need to wash your favorite shirt by itself so you can wear it again the next day.

2. Wear your clothes more than once (unless you got completely sweaty or your clothes smell, in that case please do everyone a favor and wash them). We wash our clothes more often than we need to, and washing them less will not only save energy, water, and detergent, but it will also make your clothes and washing machine last longer.

3. Wash your clothes in cold water. A lot people seem to think that cold water will not make their clothes as clean as hot or warm water, but cold water works just as well, especially if you are using detergent that is formulated for cold water.

4. Use concentrated soap that comes in smaller packaging and does just as many loads of laundry as their water-laden counterparts.

5. Do not use any dryer sheets or the sheets that are supposed to be soap and dryer sheets. These are full of harmful chemicals and are a waste of money.

6. Use the smallest amount of soap possible. Many detergent bottles call for more detergent per load that truly needed to get clothes clean (how else are they going to get you to buy another bottle as often as they would like?). One of the best ways to determine how much soap you need to is to cut down on the amount of soap you use every time you do laundry until the clothes are not getting clean. Once you have found the amount it takes for the clothes to still be dirty, you can go back to the lowest point where your clothes were still clean.

7. Make your own detergent.

8. Avoid using the dryer as much as possible and instead hang out your laundry.

I am officially moved in and chipping away at the days until winter break. With six girls living in our relatively small (for so many of us) condo, I have been shocked by the overflowing trash every morning. It is surprising that we fill a large trashcan so often. I decided to start digging through it and seeing if people were throwing away recyclables (which is a problem we have been having). Unfortunately for the most part everything in our trashcan was in fact non-recyclable. The majority of our massive mound of trash was food packaging.

With so many of us eating together many people had bought food from big box stores that seem to believe that we want all of our food hermetically sealed and wrapped in plastic. We have a dozen apples sealed in a massive plastic coffin, coffee creamer that is individually packaged in tiny plastic cups, dried fruit and nuts in plastic bags, and countless other plastic enclosed food items.

To avoid all of the packaging and still be able to get such large quantities relatively cheap food it looks like we will need to go to the farmers market for our produce and see what we can buy in smaller quantities without wasting money.

Sometimes the best way to get people’s attention and understanding is to show them an image, or in this case, an infographic. With the large scale and widespread effects of marine pollution, it’s important to understand why it’s happening and what we can do to fix it.