Green Team Updates!

Hello, Green Team & Green Team followers!

There have been several new green movements in the SBA that we would like to call your attention to.

Meeting Rescheduled
The monthly Green Team meeting has been rescheduled for Thursday, February 19 from 9-10am in BA 590.

The Office Depot Green Book
After a great deal of effort to acquire it, each SBA Office should now be equipped with the Office Depot Green Guide. This ordering catalog should help each office make greener purchasing choices. Please let Faculty Services know if you have any questions/comments about this guide!

State of Recycling in the SBA
Despite the delay, the "green maps" are still coming to the SBA soon! On Monday Faculty Services met with Crystal from facilities & planning about our recycling endeavors. We are having to reassess how many bins we need & placement due to a limited amount of bins available on campus. Therefore, if anyone has feedback about the placement of bins, etc. we would love to hear it before we finalize our maps, bins & start posting the green maps.

SBA Green Team Recognition
Sarah Horn, the Green Team GA in Facilities and Planning, is hoping to feature some of the work we have done thus far! This is a great honor! So let's keep up the enthusiasm and movement!

University Green Team Meeting
Just a reminder that there is an interdepartment green team meeting next Wednesday, Feb 18th from 12-1 in the Smith 2nd floor conference room. Either Larry or myself will be going and we would love company! Let us know if you would like to attend with us.

We hope all is well and we will see you at the meeting.

If you would like any progress posted on here, please let us know :)

Rachel M. Foxhoven

SBA Green Team Tip of the Week (2/9/09)

Newspaper Recycling Information - From The Earth Works Group's The Recycler's Handbook
(courtesy of the PSU Sustainability website: http://www.pdx.edu/sustainability/pr_recycling_facts.html)

* Today, 62 million newspapers will be printed in the U.S., and 44 million will be thrown away. That means the equivalent of about 500,000 trees will be dumped into landfills this week.
* The largest component of trash in landfills is newspapers (14% by volume).
* According to Clean Ocean Action, recycling a 36-inch tall stack of newspaper saves the equivalent of about 14% of the average household electric bill.
* The average person generates 8 pounds of newspaper in a month.
* One person uses two pine trees worth of paper products each year.
* Newspaper pulp starts out as 99% water and 1% fiber.
* Americans throw away the equivalent of more than 30 million trees in newsprint each year.
* If you recycled the New York Times every day for a year, you would prevent 15 pounds of air pollution. If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times recycled, we'd keep over 6,000 tons of pollution out of the air.

Questions? Want to join the SBA Green Team? Email: greenteam@sba.pdx.edu for more information.

Paper Saving Tips

Compliments of Haley :) Look for these posted around the SBA staff areas!


How much paper can you save?

Here are some paper-saving techniques we can all use:

• Print everything double-sided
(if your printer does not have this option, send it to faculty services and they can print it for you: facultyservices@sba.pdx.edu)

• Always do a single trial copy before doing a big batch.

• Use the print preview function before printing to avoid extra pages

• Use scrap paper for notes (if you need scrap paper, visit Faculty Services)

• Print only the pages you need

• Print and photocopy drafts and internal documents on paper that has only been used on one side

Meeting Rescheduled

Due to everyone's schedules we will reschedule our monthly meeting for later this month. :)

We will let you know when we do!

Thanks, SBA Green Team!

Green Team Meeting Tomorrow!

Hello, Everyone!

Friendly reminder that there is a Green Team Meeting tomorrow at 9 am in BA 590.

See you there! :)

Last Month's Meeting Minutes

SBA Green Team Meeting Minutes (1/8/09)

*Discussed our weekly email tips and reminded everyone which week they volunteered for and to email the tip to greenteam@sba.pdx.edu

*Recapped last term’s activities and goals that we set for the year

*Progress on Goals:

*We now have the email address and the weekly tips email

*We now have flyers about saving paper when printing/copying in offices and computer labs, also emailed that to the faculty and staff

*Rachel is tracking the paper usage and getting the numbers together from last year

*Larry and Rachel are looking at where our recycle bins are now, getting more and creating maps to let people know where they are located

*New ideas:

*Haley will be keeping a log of all of the weekly tips and posting them at the end of the year for faculty, staff and students to look at

*Haley and Fran will be putting a flyer on the SBA 2^nd floor bulletin board

*Haley will look into putting something about the SBA Green Team on the SBA website and maybe a link to the ecowiki page

*Rachel will look into creating more of our profile and maybe a blog on the ecowiki site

*Fran and Rachel will attend next week’s Faculty Council meeting to introduce the Green Team

*Larry will look into what lights we currently use in the SBA and if we can get more energy efficient ones

*Kristina will look into a table or booth at the student org fair

*Rachel will look into getting together with other green teams across campus

*Tracy will look into what types of grants we might be able to get and where PSU sustainability donation money is going

*Fran will look into corporate sponsors for new computers or possible double-sided printers.

Our next meeting will be on Thursday, February 5^th. See you then!

SBA Green Team Tip of the Week (2/2/09)

Getting Rid of Junk Mail

(http://www.41pounds.org/faq/)

41pounds is a nonprofit organization that helps the average person reduce the amount of junk mail received.
According to their website:

* The average person receives 41 pounds of junk mail every year!
* To produce that amount of junk mail, over 100 million trees are destroyed annually.
* Around 28 billion gallons of water are used/wasted to recycle/produce that mail.
* Out of the mail received, an average of 44% gets tossed out unopened.

While it's possible to individually contact direct mailing companies and request to be removed, this organization will do that for you. They claim to eliminate 80-95% of junk mail and while there is a small fee, $41.00 that must be renewed every five years, they guarantee their service 100%!


Questions? Want to join the SBA Green Team? Email: greenteam@sba.pdx.edu for more information

SBA Green Team Tip of the Week (1/26/09)

From The Earth Works Group's The Recycler's Handbook - Facts about Recycling

(courtesy of the PSU Sustainability website: http://www.pdx.edu/sustainability/pr_recycling_facts.html)

• In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times his or her adult weight in garbage. This means that each adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 lbs. of trash for his or her children.
• Americans comprise about five percent of the world's population, and annually produce 27 percent of the world's garbage.
• The average college student produces 640 pounds of solid waste each year, including 500 disposable cups and 320 pounds of paper.
• In prehistoric times, 60% of the earth's surface was covered by forests - today that amount has been reduced by 30% and is still shrinking.
• It takes 17 pulpwood market-sized trees to make a ton of paper, or one tree makes about 11,500 pages of 8.5 X 11, 20 pound paper.
• Each one million of pages of paper not printed saves 85 pulp trees.
• To produce one trillion pages of paper takes 8.5 million acres of trees, representing an area larger than the country of Belgium or the state of Maryland.
• It takes 390 gallons of oil to produce a ton of paper. That ton of paper, when disposed of, takes up nearly 8 cubic feet of public landfill space. That public landfill is approximately 36% waste paper products.
• A ton of paper made from 100% wastepaper, instead of virgin fiber, saves 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water and 60 pounds of air-polluting effluents, 4100kwh of energy, three cubic yards of landfill space and taxpayer dollars which would otherwise be used for waste-disposal costs.