Heather McClellan

Review staff writer

This year a new position was established in residence hall leadership: the green chair.

“The green chair position was created to meet three major needs on campus: education about co-mingle recycling, using the free laundry service responsibly and communicating with students about energy use and water conservation to remain green,” Area Director Rachel Rickinger said.

Junior Duncan Reid, president of Greenfield, said he hopes this position will help inform people about making lifestyle choices concerning resources and to show the benefits of conservation.

“It is a good way to make it easier on residents to live healthier lives,” Reid said. “This shows a commitment from the college in a different area: sustainability.”

New chairs look forward to promoting change in their halls.

“It’s cool that someone can be a leader for recycling and to promote conservation,” freshman Hewitt Hall green chair Katherine Howard said.

To get people involved and make recycling more fun, Howard said she wants to hold contests between the floors of her residence  hall to see who can recycle the most.

“I think that this position is important because,  in college, it is really easy to be careless about throwing things away that could be recycled,” freshman Michele Wong, green chair for Mahaffey Hall, said. “A small effort can make things better.”

Wong said she plans to use non-conventional methods to get her fellow residence interested, although she is not sure what the most effective methods are yet.

“I plan to put up flyers with fun and interesting facts about recycling and conservation to get people interested,” freshman Larsell Hall green chair Amanda McGee said.

In order to make recycling a standardized practice, both McGee and Howard said they want to make bins more convenient by putting them on every floor in residence halls instead of out-of-the-way places such as the kitchen or laundry room.

“We want to focus on one project at a time so we can make sure they are successful,” Rickinger said.

The green chairs and area directors do, however, plan to establish more projects for the program in the future.

“It would help the workload if we had a green chair for every hall because [they] know their hall cultures and would know more effective ways to communicate within the hall,” Rickinger said.

If you are interested in being a residence hall green chair, contact Rickinger at [email protected]