Sustainable Living

ESW/MOSS is committed to promoting sustainable living on Harvey Mudd. Here are some suggestions for easy ways to reduce your environmental footprint as a Harvey Mudd student:

Recycling

Harvey Mudd provides recycling services through the City of Claremont. Recycling bins can be found scattered around each dorm (look for the blue bins with the blue bags) and in each student's room. Recycling is co-mingled and single stream, which means that every recyclable item goes in the same bin! Here's a list of what you can recycle:

• All plastics #1-7 (look for the number in a triangle on the item). This includes almost all plastics!
• Aluminum, steel, and tin cans/foil.
• Glass (all colors)
• Paper and cardboard
• No waxy beverage cartons!

ESW/MOSS is currently working with dining services to provide a composing program for Harvey Mudd students, but unfortunately no such program is available currently. For particularly dedicated environmentalists, Pomona College offers a compost service - compostable items (including produce scraps, vegan food scraps, thin paper, green waste, and other biodegradable items) can be disposed of in large brown compost bins on the Pomona campus.

Batteries can be recycled in the battery recycling bins present in each dorm's laundry room.

Finally, at the end of the year, Harvey Mudd provides an electronic waste recycling bin for any electronics waste you may have accumulated during the year.

Electricity Use

There are a number of simple ways to reduce your electricity use on campus:

1. Turn out the lights! This is easy to forget, but makes a big difference! Use daylight when possible, and switch from incandescent to compact fluorescent bulbs for your personal lights.
2. Eliminate phantom loads. Many electronic devices draw power even when they're not in use. Plus these items into a power strip that you can turn off when it's not in use, or simply unplug them.
3. Turn off the AC and use a fan, when you can. Use curtains to keep the heat out in the summer and in in the winter.
4. Buy energy-star appliances, which are more efficient.

Printing

With the implementation of the student printing system, the college has significantly cut down on wasteful printing. Even so, there are a lot of things you can do to keep from wasting paper:

1. Don't print when you don't need to! Read and annotate documents on your computer, instead.
2. Print double sided, with smaller margins, or with less spacing.
3. Ask your professor to go paperless: if they print every document, ask if you can use digital versions instead.

Water and Laundry

1. Try cutting 5 minutes per day from your shower - you'll save about 3,900 gallons of water a year, and 1.2 kWh of energy per shower (enough to run ten 100-watt bulbs for an hour).
2. Use the cold water setting for your laundry (this saves about 90% of the energy used for a load of laundry!)
3. Air dry your clothes (this also makes your clothes last longer)

Adapted from Pomona College's "Little Green Book" (http://www.pomona.edu/administration/sustainability/resources/publications/littlegreenbook.pdf)