Stuff is something we have in our lives and every one of those things – from bedding to cleaning supplies to the pens in your backpack – has an impact on our environment. Through the extraction and use of resources, production of the object, down to the disposal, each stage of a product’s life affects the planet we call home. By designing a Green Dorm Room on the Unity College Campus, we hope to show students how to live a greener life, which will lead to a more sustainable and better future.
Unity College is America’s Environmental College. Through classes we often learn about the impact we have on Earth but it’s not often they tell us the choices we could make to better our habits. By laying out the information on objects such as dishware, drinkware, cleaning supplies, shopping bags, bedding, and laundry on our personal website, students will be able to view how the products are made and the environmental impact along with them.
Only providing information is not enough. If we look at the model behind the Theory of Reasoned Action, we can see how certifying a dorm room allows you to move forward in the steps for pro-environmental behaviors. By providing a model dorm room, you will be instilling or reasserting evaluative beliefs about sustainability. This brings the idea of having a green dorm room into an even more positive light. You are then going to couple these evaluative beliefs with normative beliefs. Normative beliefs are those beliefs of how people would respond to the action, often accompanied with a motivation to comply with those beliefs. If being sustainable becomes the norm, these normative beliefs would become commonplace and more students would become interested in participating in the green behaviors that the school deems important enough to get you certified. These beliefs eventually become the subjective norm and become a factor in making pro-environmental choices. If we can make sustainability and green dorm rooms the norm, then we can influence change (Kollmuss and Ageyman, 2002).
These same principles can be applied to making sustainable purchases. When one person sees their peers purchasing sustainable goods they are more likely to do the same in order to maintain social standing (Zaharia and Zaharia, 2015). All consumer products have environmental impacts; by purchasing and using reusable products, you are helping to reduce these impacts. While reusable products still need raw materials and use energy to create, the length of life is much longer compared to the single-use counterparts making the reusable ones the better choice (Wake Forest University, 2014).
References
Kollmuss, A., & Agyeman, J. (2002). Mind the Gap: Why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior? Environmental Education Research, 8(3), 239-260. doi:10.1080/13504620220145401
Wake Forest University. (2014, January 27). Reusable vs. Disposable: Is it worth it? Retrieved November 06, 2017, from https://sustainability.wfu.edu/2014/01/27/reusable-vs-disposable-is-it-worth-it/
Zaharia, I., & Zaharia, C. (2015). The growth of environmentally sustainable consumerism. Economics, Management & Financial Markets, 10(2), 115-120.