Overall Rating Reporter - expired
Overall Score
Liaison Deborah Steinberg
Submission Date Aug. 1, 2011
Executive Letter Download

STARS v1.0

Carnegie Mellon University
ER-2: Student Sustainability Outreach Campaign

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete Reporter Jennifer Mankoff
Associate Professor HCII
Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII)
"---" indicates that no data was submitted for this field

Does the institution hold a campaign that meets the criteria for this credit?:
Yes

The name of the campaign(s):
StepGreen

A brief description of the campaign(s):

StepGreen is a Carnegie Mellon University student outreach campaign designed to track environmental impacts of individual student's routine behaviors and actions. The campaign strives to educate each student on how their daily routine actions affect the environment. As a research project, StepGreen.org has involved faculty and research from several disciplines including behavioral science, environmental engineering, and computer science at Carnegie Mellon. Interested students from the University's dormitories participate by firstly registering on the Stepgreen website. The students record their daily routine actions throughout the semester on the website. These actions are then evaluated and contrasted over time to present possible improvements in environmental impact of each student's actions. The campaign is also open to non-campus participants at http://footprints.cmubi.org/.


A brief description of the measured positive impact(s) of the campaign(s):

Throughout a semester, each students' daily routine is recorded on the website and converted to two quantitative values: pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions and U.S. dollars. These values are then compared and contrasted over time to recommend to a student how they have performed during a certain time frame and how they can improve. Students learn from these recommendations by adjusting their daily routine behaviors and actions to more positively impact the environment.


The website URL for the campaign:
Data source(s) and notes about the submission:

Carnegie Mellon University annually hosts other various outreach campaigns such as RecycleMania and Waste Audits to benchmark the University's recycle efforts and educate the students about sustainability. More information on these events can be found at http://www.cmu.edu/greenpractices/campus-recycling/events.html.


Carnegie Mellon University annually hosts other various outreach campaigns such as RecycleMania and Waste Audits to benchmark the University's recycle efforts and educate the students about sustainability. More information on these events can be found at http://www.cmu.edu/greenpractices/campus-recycling/events.html.

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