After four years, UF’s Office of Sustainability plans to reignite a former green campaign.
The 2010 energy efficiency campaign, Chomp Down on Energy, has dwindled in student and faculty awareness, but the Office of Sustainability is working on revamping it.
Chomp Down on Energy was a campus-wide effort to promote sustainability and energy conservation.
Allison Vitt, the outreach and communications coordinator at the UF Office of Sustainability, said the campaign is no longer being actively promoted.
“They sort of have a life cycle, and when you get it out there, its new and its fresh, and people are receptive to that message, and you give them an actionable item — something they can do,” she said.
The campaign kicked off green teams, or self-directed groups designated on campus, that would implement and enforce conservation measures within their areas.
UF’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology and Research has kept its green team since the campaign's inception.
The center’s green team, which also incorporates other departments in the Cancer and Genetics Research Complex, has taken measures to reduce its environmental footprint by acting as the leader in sustainable practices in its area, said Megan Kimmel, the communications director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology and Research.
“We get lots of shipments. We get lots of boxes and Styrofoam and cooler packs from people sending us samples,” Kimmel said. “So in ICBR, we have made it a habit to recycle all of those things or to repurpose all of those things.”
The ICBR green team has also taken measures to extend its environmentally conscious mindset to other places around campus. For example, the team does annual swamp cleanups in which they head to Lake Alice and remove trash.
Plans to revamp the Chomp Down on Energy campaign by the Office of Sustainability include redevelopment of the campaign’s office certification program. The program requires individuals to self-assess their areas on campus and find out what they can improve upon.
“Once they got through this process, they would become a green-certified office,” Vitt said. “So then, it would just be sort of one area of pride for them to be able to promote about themselves.”
Four years after its conception, the Chomp Down of Energy campaign will continue to advocate energy efficient behaviors in individuals.
“Even though it’s not an active campaign right now, where we’re not actually pushing that information out to people, the information is still there,” Vitt said. “So you still see, kind of, the residual effects around campus. Hopefully it’s reminding people that their individual changes can make a difference.”
UF has expanded since 2010. It requires more energy use to sustain each of its buildings, classrooms and facilities, but the efficient practices the campus has implemented prove that being more energy and waste efficient is a feasible goal, Vitt said.
The Office of Sustainability is hiring two additional people to manage energy efficient campaigns like Chomp Down On Energy to ensure they will maintain lasting life cycles on campus.
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 10/2/2014]
