Third Annual America Recycles Day at SC

The Green Team hosted the third annual America Recycles Day competition on November 15. The  event helps raise awareness of recycling and gets the SC students involved in the campus recycling efforts.

Activities during the America Recycles Day event included a pledge drive in which 44 SC students pledges to recycle more items. The day also included a recycling and sculpture competition in which 6 campus organizations signed up to compete. The sculpture portion of the competition challenged organizations to create a sculpture out of recyclable materials and display in on the library lawn. Tonebuilders won the sculpture competition with an impressive cardboard piano sculpture.

The recycling competition challenged organizations to collect as much recycling as they could from Nov. 4-15 and display it all on the library lawn. The Worship Outreach team collected the most recycling to claim first prize. The overall winner of the America Recycles Day competition, however, was Leadership Southwestern. The "Ships" placed second in both the bulk recycling competition and the sculpture competition to claim the overall championship.

Green Team Southwestern Purchases Water Bottle Filling Stations

Green Team Southwestern has purchased eight Elkay EZH20 Bottle Filling Stations to be installed around the Southwestern College campus. Thus far, four of the units have been installed and are operational in the Deets Library, the lower level of the Christy Administration Building, the Darbeth Fine Arts building and the lobby of Stewart Fieldhouse.

“We purchased these filling stations in order to promote the use of refillable cups and bottles instead of bottled drinking water,” says Jason Speegle, director of Green Team Southwestern.  “We received 500 customized Vapur collapsible water bottles with our purchase of the filling stations. The SC Laptop Center gave out 300 of these Vapur collapsible water bottles to SC students at the time that they received their new laptops this fall.” The Green Team is selling the collapsible Vapur water bottles for $10 each.

Some of the advantages of the filling stations include:

• The EZH2O bottle filling station fill rate is 1.1-1.5 gallons per minute, three times faster than a traditional drinking fountain.
• One-handed operation allows for a quick fill between activities.
• The electronic sensor provides touchless, sanitary operation.
• Integrated Silver Agion Anti-microbial protects against mold and mildew growth.
• Innovative Green TickerTM counts the number of bottles saved from landfills

Green Team Student Assist Isle of Lights Conversion from Incandescent to LED

Green Team students, along with other volunteers from Southwestern and the community collaborated to help change light bulbs on the Winnie the Pooh display for the annual Isle of Lights. The light bulbs on the display were changed from incandescent bulbs to high efficiency LED bulbs.

The Winnie the Pooh display contains approximately 233 lights. The change from incandescent bulbs to LED should save over 303 kilowatt-hours during the 6-week Isle of Lights display this year alone. The Isle of Lights committee has converted 5 of the displays to LED light
bulbs thus far for an estimated yearly savings of over 3,500 kWh in electricity.