Raging Inexorable Thunderlizard for Change Student - Driven Sustainability Effort at Princeton University

T he sustainability movement received yet more encouragement and took another baby step as students at Princeton University led a campus-wide adoption of 100% post-consumer-waste paper (PCW) for the New Jersey campus’s use in copiers and information technology printers. “Leave it to the young,” an uncourageous mantra of many in the environmental movement, may be beginning to actually pay off as the youth of America on many campuses are creating the kind of leverage to bring about change in the 800-year-old bastion of tradition on the college campus. After many failed attempts by environmental activists to convert many college and university campuses to more environmentally responsible alternatives to virgin-timber-based papers, today’s youth are having more success. The key to this success may lie in the databased approach to the issues of the environment, as opposed to the more emotional and anecdotal approaches of the past, and in the willingness of the students to work within the traditional structures of higher education, most notably the committee. The Princeton students worked very hard and in a very science-based way to effectuate change on their campus. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t quick – but it was effective. sumer-waste product, the market value for paper declines. As the market declines, the economic viability of recycling programs becomes less vibrant. Paper consumers are frequently misinformed about their paper-making decision criteria. The marketing of paper is very sophisticated. And without casting aspersions towards any segment in the process, the results are confusing at best. A common mistake made by buyers of paper is to confuse percent recycled content with the actual act of recycling. Within the paper industry, the notion of recycled content has everything to do with recycling mill scrap, roll-end cuts, waste, and selvage. It has nothing to do with the recycling program at your home operated on behalf of the city or county, school, church, college, or university. This is because the industry has created the notion that post-consumer-waste is the mechanism to describe and market products that have been used and then harvested by a recycling process not operated by the industry and then returned to the paper manufacturers as feedstock – but used feedstock, or postconsumer-waste. The undertaking by the students was not something easily accomplished or one that moved with great speed, but it was In their journey, the students identified three major obstacles worth noting: ● The cost difference between virgin paper and post-consumer-waste paper, ● Concerns among potential users of postconsumer-waste paper about its quality, and ● Decentralized purchasing. There are 280 independent purchasers making up Princeton’s Academic and Administrative Managers Group (AAMG).