Go Green<\/a> week, we have been thinking of ways in which our approaches to study can be made greener.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTo me, being a\ngreen student fundamentally means not being wasteful. The three key steps to\nminimizing waste, as we know are Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, in that order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Generally as a\nsubject geography does not require us to realms of resources such as print\nbooks, as the nature of the subject often requires us to use a variety of\nreferences from different resources. The majority of which can be accessed by\neBook or online journal. What this means is that instead of increasing the\ndemand for several different books by forcing students to buy a resource they\nwont use in its entirety, access to the relevant information can be obtained\nvirtually without the need for mass production of books that may not be sold,\nor purchased and not used to its full capacity. As you can see the department\nhas already taken measures to help us achieve step one of minimizing waste\n(Reduce), but we can still take this a step further in our study and revision. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now as students\nif were completely honest, when assessment period comes along, the workload is\nheavy, and exams are looming, we can be guilty of letting the environment take\na back seat to our other priorities, but there are little things we can do. I\noften like to have the resource physically in front of me when I am making notes\nor annotations, so when I do need to print a resource, I will take that simple\nstep of clicking double sided when printing, and I will also only print the\nrelevant pages for my notes, so those four pages of references at the end of an\narticle never see the light of day (sorry), but I have saved on paper\nconsumption and printing credits (these are not cheap haha).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I am\nmaking notes, any papers that become scrap I will often Reuse<\/strong> to make any rough notes tor other modules I am preparing for,\nI also do like a good piece of scrap paper to do my doodles on whilst I\u2019m procrastinating\nor trying to work through a mind block. And when it does finally come to the\nend of assessment period and your notes have become useless, as much as I have\nthe desire to take all of my notes and burn them, they end up in the Recycling<\/strong> bin.<\/p>\n\n\n\nI think as\nstudents at Sussex on a whole we do regard the environment as important,\nhowever as I said before when the stress piles on and the fact we are first and\nforemost here to study, it can be easy for being green to be overlooked. If I\nput myself in the shoes of a student that had a subject that did require a lot\nof text books, with my learning style I think I would prefer to have the\nphysical book in front of me, unless it was one of the interactive eBooks where\nyour notes can be exported. With text book in mind however, the thought of\nhaving books printed on recycled paper does appeal to me. Although I don\u2019t\nthink it would dictate whether I purchased a book I needed or not, and I think\nthis would be the case for many other students too, as getting a good grade\ncomes first. However knowing the books I need and use are printed on recycled\npaper regardless, would make me recognize a publisher as a globally conscious\ncompany doing their part to preserve our world for the future. We cannot\nconsume something that hasn\u2019t been produced for us, so the more readily\naccessible greener options are to people, the easier it will be to engage with\nit. <\/p>\n