Soon after becoming sustainability coordinator for Meredith College last year, Laura Fieselman donated her office trash can to a colleague as incentive to recycle. That left Fieselman stashing paper waste in her desk drawer and disposing of her own garbage piece by piece.
Fieselman insists the loss of her own trash can is not a hardship. She doesn’t mind walking three doors down the hall to the break room to throw away lunch scraps and used paper towels. She also believes campus constituencies will more likely adopt conservation-minded practices if she proves, through day-to-day example, that they are not overly difficult.
She and other “green officers” at U.S. colleges agree that the nature of their jobs makes them de facto role models for environmental responsibility. Consequently, they regularly make sacrifices to avoid appearing hypocritical.
University of Texas-San Antonio energy manager Robert Rodriguez now receives seven print magazine and professional journal subscriptions by e-mail (see Rodriguez in video). But before assuming that job, he consumed all of them as hard-copy publications, spending hours at a time reading while nursing a cup of coffee, tearing out the occasional article, and liberally running his highlighter through interesting parts.
