Princeton Undergraduate Student Government

This year, Princeton students have demonstrated an increasingly strong commitment to campus sustainability.  In light of this trend, the USG has been working with student environmental groups on various initiatives to make Princeton more sustainable.

One of the first efforts we have focused on is reducing our “footprint” by cutting back on our paper consumption. Believe it or not, 10.6 million sheets of paper were printed at OIT computer clusters in the past academic year, and that only represents some of the printing at Princeton!  After looking at the statistics, we set a goal for a 20% reduction in student paper consumption by the end of the next academic year.  This would reduce our overall printing to 8.5 million sheets.

In order to accomplish our goal, we initially set a quota of 3000 sheets per student per year.  This number was determined to be a little more than one standard deviation above the mean.  We set the quota at this level so that it would only require the top 10% of printers to reduce their consumption, while leaving most students unaffected.

After an initial proposal was made to the student body, the CPUC, and the Office of Sustainability, we began consulting students, faculty, and staff to discuss the proposal and determine ways it could be improved. In these dicussions, we were presented with a large number of different opinions and suggestions. So many, in fact, that we believed a reevaluation of our initial policy was required.

This reevaluation process involved not only consulting more students, but also talking to behavioral psychologists in the Psychology Department.  We made these consultations because we wanted to create a new printing policy that would address students’ printing needs while encouraging sustainable behaviors.  After these consultations, we determined that our policy needed to be revised in order to optimally reach this twofold goal.

We believe that our new proposal will fit students’ various printing needs while better reducing our paper consumption and discouraging exorbitant printing. Our new printing policy is still in the process of being revised and polished in collaboration with top administrators at OIT, and we plan to release the final plan at the beginning of the fall semester.

Please contact Julia Kaplan with any questions, comments, or concerns you may have.