Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) started a dorm energy conservation competition on Feb. 9 that will continue to the end of April.
SIFE is a worldwide program spanning more than 47 countries, according to its Web site. This is the first year the program has added an environmental sustainability subsection to its program.
“With the SIFE environmental sustainability, our objective was to come up with some way to promote it,” said sophomore Christopher Nissen, SIFE member. “We decided what we’d do is we’ll create a competition between the dorms to see who can use the least amount of energy and who can recycle the most paper.”
Nissen said the environmental sustainability program was added because companies were starting to realize how much money they could save themselves by doing simple things like turning off computers and printers at night to save energy.
“A lot of these little things really start to add up,” Nissen said.
SIFE felt that those same energy conservation techniques could be used to bring about a positive energy saving change on Ouachita’s campus. The only problem is they did not know how to get the students to take an interest in the competition.
They decided the best way to get the students involved was to make it personal to them by rewarding each student in the winning dorm a $25 personal check card.
“I believe that it makes a lot more incentive there if you’re going to be awarded individually for your work,” Nissen said.
Brittany Norton, co-president of SIFE, said Ouachita has agreed to provide the prize money. She, along with her fellow SIFE, members made up a checklist for the judging to determine how “green” each individual dorm is.
The dorms will be judged based on how much they have recycled as well as how much energy they are saving by not having their lights, computers, televisions, gaming systems and printers on. Random room checks will determine how often those electronic devices are turned on when no one is in the room.
“The main place to save energy is in the dorm rooms and the things we use from day to day,” Nissen said.
Nissen said the competition is about more than the money the students can receive. He stresses that the competition is meant to make students realize how their actions have an impact on the environment.
“It is to encourage students to be more aware of the environment and how we affect the environment,” Norton said “Even in the little things we can help conserve energy.”
