With NU getting into the full swing of Green Cup, it is hard to find anyone who would call the competition a bad thing. But just how good of a thing is Green Cup? How much good can turning off a light switch or putting your computer to sleep really do for the environment?
Well, you’re about to find out.

Green Cup* began Jan. 21 and is a competition in which residence halls attempt to recycle the most waste and to use the least amount of electricity and water per person. Facilities Management measures these values, and the student group Engineers for a Sustainable World analyzes the data, allocates points, and determines the winner at the end of the competition, March 3.

According to U.S. Climate Technology Cooperation Gateway, an EPA-sponsored organization, saving a single watt-hour of electricity (equivalent to the energy used by your 100-watt light bulb in 36 seconds) can save about 1/2 of a gram of CO₂ emissions from the power plant generating the power. This isn’t a huge amount, but it adds up.

As an example of this cumulative effect, imagine that you’re running late one morning. You just finished submitting a paper online, and you have to be at a midterm in ten minutes. You rush out the door, leaving on your desk lamp and your PC. You stumble back in four hours later, triumphant that you’ve accomplished your day’s trials. Unfortunately, your sense of triumph might be premature: by not turning off your equipment, you’ve helped release 730 grams, or more than 1.6 pounds, of carbon dioxide.

How do you know? It is a pretty simple calculation. Your desk lamp, if it’s a 100 watt incandescent bulb, burned through 400 watt-hours of electricity during your four hour absence. From our conversion above, this means that just shy of 200 grams of CO₂ were released as a byproduct of the production of the electricity needed to power your unused lamp. Even worse, your computer, if it’s a PC, will use about 90 more watts of power for the CPU and 120 more watts for the monitor than would be used had you put the machines to sleep. This gives us a waste of 420 grams, or nearly a pound, of wasted CO₂.

Now, this isn’t a huge waste by any means. The daily total CO₂ emission of the United States is in the neighborhood of about 36,300,000,000 pounds. Allow yourself, however, to imagine that all 7,800 Northwestern undergraduates chose simply to turn off their lamp and put their computer to sleep before leaving their rooms in the morning. Now suppose they do this every day over the entire course of Green Cup, 43 days.

With this simple, painless lifestyle change, we’ve now saved 536,640 pounds, or nearly 270 tons, of CO₂. Again according to U.S. Climate Technology Cooperation Gateway, this is equivalent to keeping 53 passenger cars off the roads for a year, two acres of forest protected from deforestation, or not burning 570 barrels of oil. And all this came without any more the effort than flicking a switch or pressing a button.

While Students for Ecological and Environmental Development (SEED), which encourages students to participate in the event, would love to prevent these emissions, they hope to accomplish more with the Green Cup than just these short term savings.

“We want to conserve as much energy as possible, but the idea behind [Green Cup] is to endow students with environmental values to continue to be stewards of the environment,” said SEED President Jesse Sleamaker. “We feel that if we inspire someone to act on behalf of the environment now, it will have a much greater impact in the future than just turning down the or turning off the lights.”

*Clarification — Tuesday, January 29, 2008: This article originally said Green Cup was sponsored primarily by SEED and the Alumni Association. While both groups encourage students to be involved with the event, actual financial sponsorship comes from University Housing, Sodexho, Facilities Management, Student Affairs and the Residence Hall Association.