Sunday, January 18, 2009

Free Mug Give away!

Just so everyone knows tommorow at the regular Muggy Monday spot where we normally give out free coffee the dalhousie sustainability office will be giving out FREE TRAVEL MUGS to fulfill this week's green act of the week- using travel mugs! This is one part of the one million acts of green challenge between Dal and Acadia! See you tommorow morning between 8:30 and 12:00pm.

Also don't forget to check out the Sustaindal table at the Society fair this wednesday afternoon! If you want to volunteer to help set up, take down or just hang out at the table for a bit just e-mail us at sustaindal@dal.ca.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

One Million Acts of Green Kickoff

From October 2008 – Summer 2009, CBC is running a campaign called One Million Acts of Green. The idea behind the campaign is that one small act can make a big difference. If you add up everyone’s individual acts we can make significant change. The CBC is asking everyone to get involved from organizations such as universities to individuals.

Starting January 15 – April 15th Dalhousie will be in a challenge against Acadia to meet our committed acts of green. The challenge is based on student population. Dalhousie’s challenge is 16,000 acts and Acadia’s is 3000. These acts will help to reduce tangible ecological and economic costs such as green house gases and money for utilities.

We need everyone from the Dalhousie community to help out – students, employees and alumni. How does it work? Register at the One Million Acts of Green Website. http://green.cbc.ca/Default.aspx. Join the Dalhousie group so your acts can be registered for the challenge. Fill in your name in your profile so we can count people for internal challenges. Scan the over 80 acts. Give yourself a pat on the back and click on Acts that you are already doing consistently now at home and at the university. You can see how much green house gases you are saving. Identify Acts you would like to start to do and do it! Then you can click on this Act.
Throughout the campaign period, a specific Act will be featured each week through campus communications vehicles such as Dal News. In addition events will be organized to help support the promotion of some of the Act. Keep your ears out for neat events. You can do more than the 14 acts at anytime.

Dalhousie will be launching a new initiative for everyone on campus in September 2009 called ReThink – Creating a Culture of Sustainability on campus. ReThink will be a fun, interactive forum for organizational learning through sustainability teams and annual awards. As part of this program Dalhousie will be commissioning two Sustainability trophies to be awarded each year. These trophies will be awarded in September 2009 to the residence and overall university group that did the most Acts of Green through this campaign. In addition the person with the most acts of green will receive a prize.

Internal campus competitions are encouraged. If you are rallying your groups to participate make sure you track who has participated and how many Acts of Green they did so you can submit the final tally to the Office of Sustainability at the end of the campaign in April.