• Working with Facilities and Services to prepare CRCE and the ARC to be part of the Runtime Reduction Program regarding heat/air usage.
• Ice Arena locker room and lobby benches are made from recycled plastic.
• Adventure Center countertop made from 100% recycled wood.
• Installation of automatic towel dispensers and foam soap dispensers at all facilities. Foam soap is a green product.
• Ice Arena has Astro-foil ceiling: it is reflective, providing additional light while not absorbing heat. Between new cooling towers, a new ceiling, new lights and a low-emissivity foil system, the energy load at the Ice Arena should be reduced by 30-45%.
• All lighting, indoors and outdoors, has been changed to LED, fluorescent, metal halide, or mercury vapor.

• Two synthetic turf fields cuts down on seed, water, fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides.
• Switching to green cleaning chemicals wherever possible, as well as installing automatic dispensers to insure we are getting the right ratio of water to chemical instead of depending on each person to always use the right ratio.
• Recycling sorting containers throughout facilities.
• Print materials on recycled paper.
• Green Hours at the ARC with reduced lighting from 6:30 am-4 pm.
• Light sensors in racquetball courts and offices.
• Water reduction with dual-flush toilets, low-flow urinals, and automatic faucets at all facilities.
• Certified as a green-cleaning department.
• Installing solar-thermal system to heat indoor pool.

Fact: Transportation is responsible for approximately a third of the average American’s global warming impact. Americans use about 385 million gallons of gasoline every day, which means more than a gallon of gasoline every day for every man, woman and child.

What You Can Do: Walk, bike, rollerblade, skateboard to class. Take advantage of the public transportation system (MTD), keep up with scheduled maintenance on your car, and combine your errands in a single trip.

Fact: If you replace just one out of four of your light bulbs with fluorescents, you can save about 50% on your lighting bill. Also, swapping 16 incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL) saves emissions equivalent to taking a car off the road for a year.

What You Can Do: Go to the nearest Target, Menards, Wal-Mart, etc. and replace your normal light bulbs with fluorescent light bulbs, saving you energy, and money.

Fact: Almost 40% of America’s waste is paper and could be recycled, meaning fewer trees cut down. Making a ton of paper from recycled stock saves up to 17 trees and uses 50% less water than making paper from virgin fiber.

What You Can Do: Recycle! Reuse old notebooks if they’re not completely filled, print on both sides of the paper, and create a recycling bag just for paper. For Professors: don’t use course packets, instead use the internet or at least make sure the paper for the packet has been recycled.

Fact: Thirty-six states are anticipating water shortages by 2016. Yet the average American uses more than 100 gallons of water each day.

What You Can Do: Take shorter showers, turn the water off while brushing your teeth, and wash dishes frequently so you don’t have the water on for long periods of time.

Fact: Microwaves are between 3.5 and 4.8 times more energy efficient than traditional electric ovens. If it costs ten cents to cook one item in a microwave, it would cost forty-eight cents to cook the same item in a standard oven. If everyone in North America cooked exclusively with a microwave for a year, we’d save as much energy as the entire continent of Africa consumes during that same time.

What You Can Do: Use the microwave to cook your meals!

Fact: Plastic water bottles create small-scale environmental disasters. American demands for plastic water bottles requires the use of more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel approximately 100,000 U.S. cars for a year.

What You Can Do: Use filtered tap water in a reusable bottle, and you’ll save money as well as show the world that you’re green. Switch to a glass container at home or in the office.

Fact: Keeping your television, DVD player, stereo, and computer on when you’re not using them will create thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide a year. Even when turned off, things like hairdryers, cell phone chargers and televisions use energy. In fact, the energy used to keep display clocks lit and memory chips working accounts for 5 percent of total domestic energy consumption and spews 18 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year!

What You Can Do: Turn off electronic devices when you’re not using them. Not only should you turn them off, but unplug electronics from the wall when you’re not using them.

Kitchen

• Use a microwave or barbeque grill instead of the stove. Microwaves use 40 percent less electricity than a stove because they cook faster at a lower wattage. The monthly cost to use a stove one hour each day is about $6.00 compared to $3.00 for electricity used by a microwave daily for 30 seconds.
• Preheat the oven only when necessary and try not to open the oven door while food is cooking—each time the door is opened, the oven loses 20 percent of its heat. Unless you’re baking breads or pastries, you may not need to preheat the oven at all. Turn off 15 minutes before stop time—the oven will retain heat and continue cooking.

Living Room

• Use a power strip to turn off appliances completely. Eliminating this “standby” electricity loss from home appliances could save up to 25 percent on electrical bills.

Bathroom

• Repair leaky faucets. A faucet dripping just two drops per second can waste over 350 gallons of water per month. Repairing a hot-water leak could save enough energy to power your television for up to two hours a day for more than six years!

Other

• Turn off lights when not in use. Household lights alone can account for 15% or about $100 of a home’s energy use.
• When you turn on the air conditioner, don’t turn the thermostat to the coldest setting. The air in your home will not cool off any faster.