The holiday season inspires many to show gratitude through celebrations, gift giving, and traveling to visit loved ones. Unfortunately, these activities can generate waste and contribute to our growing carbon footprint. In the United States, household waste increases by 25% between Thanksgiving and New Year’s and 33% more food is thrown away. That’s more than 25 million tons of extra waste.
At NYU, we can do our part to change the consumptive-culture around the holidays and reduce our impact.
By Lily Kunkel
New York City has an immense network of compost drop-off sites that make it easy for you collect your food scraps whether you’re living on or off campus.
NYU is committed to making our campuses healthier and more sustainable places to work, learn, and live. Here’s how to find us during NYU Welcome 2021:
by Eni Owoeye
This time last year, the NYU community felt a collective shock. For students, the shock may have been a buzz of excitement at the prospect of staying at home because “Zooming” into class actually sounded thrilling. But for most, the shock slowly creeped into a panic as more blue, green, and white masks started to pop up around the City. Whatever the feeling was, we are now grappling with it one year later. The following are a collection of student stories about what they learned about themselves, their connections to others, and their connections to the environment this past year.
Learning, teaching, research, work, and travel can be a challenge during a global pandemic, but the changes we’ve all made have also added up to a record drop in global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also caused a dramatic increase in the amount of time spent on Zoom, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, or other virtual meeting platforms. A recent study1 conducted by researchers at Purdue, MIT, and Yale suggests2 that due to the way that conferencing data is processed and transferred across the Internet, turning off the camera during video calls could reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of virtual conferencing by 96%. Should we all be leaving our camera off during our next virtual meeting to “save the planet”?
