Conservation efforts affect everyone, yet efforts to make changes are limited at UCLA.
UCLA set goals to reduce water use on campus by 20 percent by 2020 based on 1999 to 2001 levels. The initiatives began in 2011 and changes include landscaping and infrastructure changes, education of students on the Hill and reduction of meat served in the dining halls.
Currently UCLA has reduced its water consumption by 7.6 percent. The UCLA Office of Sustainability says they are on track to make the 2020 goals. This year, the Office of Residential Life has made a larger push to conserve more water as well as to recoup the water lost in the pipe break on Sunset Boulevard in July 2014 which wasted 20 million gallons flooding campus.
The Office of Sustainability and the Hill are working to educate students who live on the Hill on conservation, which is good. But only about 15,000 students live in the dorms at UCLA out of about 43,000 total students, which means a majority of students is not receiving adequate education from the university on these issues. We need to use our leverage and power as a research institution to work on a larger scale and see ourselves as a piece of the puzzle, not the whole picture.
The Office of Sustainability should expand conservation projects by expanding education efforts to students who live off campus through online mediums, pamphlets, events and classes.
The university should look at all the ways it is promoting water conservation on the Hill and create new programs that educate students living off campus about how to take similar conservation measures in their own homes.
For instance, the Hill is making efforts to reduce meat consumption in the dining halls, which is important because the meat industry contributes to global warming 40 percent more than all of transportation. In fact, each hamburger uses 4,000 to 18,000 gallons. To save 4,000 gallons of water, someone would have to take a two minute shorter shower everyday for two years. To help offset some of this waste, some dining halls have Meatless Mondays, and all dining halls have Beef-less Thursdays.
These efforts are steps in the right direction, but UCLA should make an effort to include students living off campus in this particular conservation measure. Students should be made aware why meat is limited on the Hill and encouraged to keep its effect on the environment in mind when making food choices on and off campus.
A few easy ways for UCLA to do that is for the Office of Sustainability to engage in social media campaigns and email out educational materials about water use to all students. Promoting beefless or meatless eating on Bruin Walk would also likely generate more interest from students. Many students are unaware of the impact that their food choices have on the planet and education of the population at large could change their choices.
Another part of student involvement is personal water use. Shower timers and education on small ways to conserve water daily have been promoted on the Hill.
This could be expanded to all students at UCLA by handing out timers on Bruin Walk set to five minutes for students in apartments to use to time their own showers. Holding other events and distributing pamphlets educating students on water reduction could also help take Hill-centered efforts on campus.
Education needs to be focused on the most effective ways of decreasing water consumption, not just the most obvious. It also needs to be expanded past the Hill.
All the good work being done at UCLA and specifically on the Hill should be carried further to students in apartments and to the community at large.
UCLA could be 100 percent sustainable and could reduce water consumption by 50 percent, and that wouldn’t make a dent in the global climate problem, let alone the California drought. Education is the most important part of this change because that is what can be carried off campus and integrate the positive changes made at UCLA to wherever students go.