Big Red Goes Green

In a world of elevators, smartphones and online shopping, the biggest virtue for any product is convenience—how much it saves creative, intellectual individuals from wasting precious time on performing tedious, mindless tasks.

We as Exonians, the epitome of human productivity, certainly cannot spare twenty minutes to trod down the path to Walgreens for the water bottles, shampoos and snacks necessary for our daily subsistence. We must, therefore, resort to Amazon, the best cash-generating, convenience-bringing invention in history. Members of Campus Facilities and the Post Office Room would agree—every day, they receive an average of 200 cardboard boxes for a campus of roughly 1000 students and 200 faculty.

Convenience, however, comes at the cost of environmental sustainability, particularly when people are online shopping. Last year, transportation surpassed power plants as the United States’s top producer of the monster of greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide.

Furthermore, online products come with a significant amount of packaging. To ensure that products are safely transported to consumers, Amazon always resorts to bulky packaging.

Worse still, once the boxes arrive at the mailroom, many students casually toss them into the trash can or carry the boxes with them back to their dormitories.

“Break that thang!”

This is the problem that the Green Umbrella Learning Lab student research team tackled last fall. Under the guidance of English Instructor Jason BreMiller, Senior Manager of Sustainability and Natural Resources Jill Robinson and Mailroom Supervisor Joseph Goudreault, the team implemented a “box-breaking station” close to the mailboxes, complete with box cutters, a gigantic recycling bin and a banner with a catchy phrase: “Break that thang!”

After two months, the results were less than satisfactory. According to senior Anna Clark, not only did students fail to break the boxes, but they employed the box cutters for vandalism purposes, tearing up the bulletin board and pocketing the knife blades. “There used to be paper covering the billboard. The vandalism was pretty bad,” Clark said. “After seeing what people did we took [the paper covering] out and painted the billboard red. We also glued the blades to the box cutters.”

Goudreault did see an improvement in students’ behavior, however, especially when the mailroom staff began to proactively remind package recipients of their responsibility. “It started rather slow but things are getting along. People are breaking the boxes and putting them in the appropriate bins,” Goudreault said. “Before they ordered the box bin, it was just that corner where people left stuff all over the little trash cans, no organization at all.”

After talking to facilities staff members, Clark learned that they started having to empty out the box bin more, which is a sign that students are breaking down their boxes. The only issue now is that some students still prefer to carry the boxes with them to the dorms before breaking them up. To solve the problem, senior Abel Ngala tried to build a similar box-breaking station in Peabody Hall with box cutters in the common room, but the effort has been less successful. “I don’t see people use it that often,” Ngala said.

To witness firsthand the effectiveness of the box-cutting station in PO, I decided to camp out in the mailroom for part of a department meeting, and observed Exonians flooding in and out with their newly-purchased items. One senior opened his box, took out some sweatshirts, then casually put the box into the bin without breaking it down. Meanwhile, upper Francie Treadwell took up the box cutter and tried to make a cut, exclaiming, “This is so hard!” After one minute, she succeeded in breaking down a carefully-taped box. “I think the set-up is convenient,GO but I’m having a lot of difficulty breaking down the box,” she said.

Despite thinking of the project as a success in general, upper Gwyneth Crossman, a member of the Green Umbrella Learning Lab team, admitted that there were many parts which did not go according to plan. To encourage more students to break down their boxes, the team tried to add a lid to the bin so that only a flattened box would fit. This effort was ultimately unsuccessful because of maintenance issues.

At the heart of the matter are still students’ ordering habits. According to Clark, these are “a personal choice” and “hard to fix.” The team did, however, try to work with Amazon to implement more environmentally-friendly options, such as packaging that could be reused by the mailroom.

Another solution, Crossman said, was to give customers the option of “delivery pulling,” or having multiple packages delivered in the same box. However, they were unable to effectively communicate with Amazon. Crossman, Ngala and Clark have laid the groundwork for more sustainable online shopping and mailroom habits, and they hope the project will be taken up next year by new students so that plans to collaborate with Amazon can still materialize.