Green Tips for ITaP

As our materialist student body and Purdue administration continue to bulldoze through our earth’s natural resources, we draw closer and closer to catastrophic ecological disaster. One of the greatest wastes on campus is our bloated technological infrastructure, which everyday continues to strangle our dear fragile Mother Gia. Here are our solutions:

1. Fewer computer labs. In Beering there are 6 whole computer labs. In Stanley Coulter there are 10. Throughout campus there are over 50 computer labs containing over 1600 computers. That is a lot of wasted power! No one’s education is worth that much damage to the environment.

2. Smaller monitors. Oversized screens are overrated. While LCDs are more environmentally friendly than the old CRTs, they still require more power if they are large. An easy solution is to get rid of all the current monitors and replace them with 13” to 15” monitors. This is perfect for an 800x600 display, allowing for computer necessities without encouraging the frivolity that is killing our planet.

3. Fewer projectors/computers in classrooms. What is the purpose of blackboards again? It seems more and more professors are taking the easy way out by creating “PowerPoint presentations” and projecting them onto screens. Their laziness and desire for flashy graphics are wasting power through both the computers and projectors (in over 300 classrooms across campus!) These professors need to take responsibility for their planet and start using chalkboards and erasers again.

4. Charge more for printouts. While many people wanted to go to double-sided printing to save money, the true purpose of green goals is to help the planet, not the pocketbooks of college kids. If students were given a smaller quota, or were charged more per page, printing would be discouraged. This would save innocent trees from being slaughtered in the Amazon to feed our paper fetish. This might also allow ITaP to get rid of some of those huge, power-hungry printers they have scattered all over campus.

5. Use lower-quality paper. Currently, ITaP’s computer labs use bleached, durable, professional-looking paper. This is unacceptable in a sustainable lifestyle! We should use thinner, bleach-free, 100% recycled paper. While it may look horrible, fall apart, break the printers, and be useless, it is one more way of pulling the knife out of Mother Nature’s back.

6. Set time limits for computers. Students throughout the year will sometimes sit at a computer in a lab for hours. During Dead Week, this gets even worse as the Stanley Coulter labs are open 24 hours. The students may say this is in the name of education, but the potential damages to both the environment and the student’s health from them sitting at a single desk for hours are much more serious than any minor final exam or senior project. A hard time limit would force students to work efficiently with the environment always on their minds. They, of course, would be kept from logging on to other computers once their daily allotted time had expired.

7. Force multiple pages per sheet. While the double-sided printing idea was great, it didn’t go far enough. Some students are still able to purposefully do damage to their home planet by choosing single-sided printing for whatever reason. This ability needs to be taken away. Another option is forcing multiple pages per sheet. This ingenious technique would condense pages of notes to ½ or ¼ of their regular size and put multiple pages on a single side of paper. If this is done correctly, 1 sheet of paper could be used where 8 were once the norm! This might make the notes a bit harder to read, but students should just go get a stronger prescription for their contacts and remember the environment.

8. Turn off computers at night. Currently, ITaP leaves computers in both labs and classrooms on all night long. They claim this is for “cleaning” and “updating software” and “watching the status” of the machines, but this is clearly unnecessary. Any updates that would require a computer to be on all night are just not worth it. These updates should occur during the day. This may disturb normal use of the computers, but that is a good thing when one considers how much energy is saved through the discouragement of computer use.

9. Offer carbon credits as an alternative to print quotas. If ITaP really wanted to prove their fidelity to the green cause, they would revoke their capitalistic method of charging money for printouts. The best way would be to allow students to either purchase or work toward carbon credits that could be redeemed for printer privileges. If they cannot be afforded with cash, the next best option would be giving them to students for participation in green activist student groups, protesting Republican and capitalist establishments, taking liberal indoctrination courses, or by recruiting others to the carbon credit movement. This method would truly force students to start caring about our Mother Earth and finally allow our broken planet to begin the healing process.