The start of the academic year for U of T’s Sustainability Office means the launch of a community-based social marketing initiative in seven residences, one office, and the University of Toronto at Mississauga, with the goal of reducing energy consumption by five to ten per cent.
The program, called Rewire, is only a small part of what the Sustainability Office is doing to reduce energy consumption on campus.
“What community-based social marketing does is looks at why people might not want to change their behaviours and tries to address those issues,” said Chris Caners, coordinator of the Sustainability Office. The Rewire project was piloted in February successfully and will reach over 4,000 people in this launch, which is set for October.
“It’s a sophisticated ad campaign. It’s a sophisticated information campaign. It’s a sophisticated look at what barriers are to reducing energy consumption,” said Caners. Using toolkits and focus groups, the program combines research and advertising to change the way people think about energy.
How these energy reductions translate into reduced emissions is another challenge the office is tackling. Already, the university saves 3,100 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions through the retrofit of lighting and chillers in buildings and libraries, equivalent to removing 600 cars from the road.
“The office hasn’t been around that long, but we’re starting to measure those things and to be able to monitor those certain things,” said Caners. Inventories for waste production, transportation emissions, and greenhouse gas reductions are a key goal of the office.
New initiatives like running grounds vehicles on biodiesel and the possibility of a campus wind turbine are only a few of the ideas the students at the Sustainability Office are currently researching. Even small steps like installing motion sensitive lighting are important building blocks to making the university more energy efficient.
“What we try and do is take the best technologies and ideas and programs and implement them here, and certainly do research on that,” said Caners. “We try to bridge the gap between research and operations.”
