Follow-Up on "Get Out Green" Program

At closing this past spring I wrote briefly about a program developed by Residence Life to encourage students to leave their dorm room for the summer in a way that lessens the impact on the environment. The program was called, "Get Out Green." Facilities played a part in it by encouraging residents in Independence Hall to not throw their room carpets in the dumpster but to put them in two areas near the exits of the buildings that would be later collected and be recycled by our carpet installation contractor. This carpet pile from Independence West was trucked to Wilmington, for a total of 184 pieces of carpet in various sizes that did not get thrown away in a landfill. Although the program has started out small in just one complex, we hope to expand the program to all the complexes at some point in the future. It probably saved us at least one full dumpsters' worth of carpet that was sent to a factory to give the discarded pieces of carpet a new life.

In Honor of Campus Sustainability Day

Today is Campus Sustainability Day at UD and a time to highlight initiatives everyone is making across campus to manage our community in a way that minimizes impacts on the environment. One of those ways is to responsibly dispose of old mattresses from the Residence Hall system. A way that we do that is to partner with Ohio Mattress Recovery, a company that recycles old mattresses and diverts them from the traditional places they end up in like a landfill or worse. The photo this week shows a load of our old mattresses filling up a truck bound for recycling at the plant.

An Idea (Paint) Whose Time Has Come...

Recently students in Thomas McKean Hall asked if they could have a large dry erase board installed in their first floor lounge. Instead of just trying to purchase and install such a board, we decided to try a relatively new product dubbed "ideapaint." Similar to "blackboard" paint, ideapaint allows you to apply a paint product to any surface you wish and thus allows people to use a dry erase marker on it similar to a board. A big benefit is that you can control the size and shape of the writeable surface and you can apply it virtually anywhere. UD is going to try it at Thomas McKean and then go to other locations if it is popular.