Background: Eco-Heroes

Asked the Students for Advice Student Housing has long desired to be more environmentally friendly and to reduce energy use in the student apartments. We have tried before, but without success. So this year we asked the students for advice. Because who understands the needs and behaviors of students better than students themselves? We asked SiO students the following question:

How can we turn environmental conscience into environmental action? Everyone knows that we should turn off the lights, take shorter showers, etc, but how can we get people to do these things every day?

Environmental Campaign
We realized that we didn’t need to worry about reaching the students who were already working hard to save energy and help the environment. Instead, we wanted to get the attention of those people who care about the environment, but sometimes forget to follow these easy rules in their everyday life. Most of us know the feeling: All of these actions seem so small and meaningless. What difference can I make all by myself? At the same time, we know that it takes everyone doing their part to make a difference. If everyone saved a little bit of electricity every day, together we could save a lot of energy.

The Students’ Environmental Group
With this idea, SiO and Student Housing brought together a group of five students. They come from different student apartments and have different academic backgrounds. Our goal was to creat our own “CSI” group that could lead an environmental campaign based on the students’ own knowledge and environmental engagement.

We Need Eco-Heroes
The students came up with the idea of eco-heroes. We have to inspire people to think about the environment every day- to be heroes for the environment in their everyday life . But in order to do this, the student group had one demand: Student Housing had to give something in return. If the students could save energy, then Student Housing should use that savings to benefit the students. And what the students wanted was a better and more accessible waste recycling system.