Ecochallenge.org

Campus Ecochallenge

Clay Wadman

ENST 246 : Environmental Activism

POINTS TOTAL

0 TODAY
0 THIS WEEK
675 TOTAL

participant impact

UP TO

108

gallons of water

have been saved
UP TO

15

meatless or vegan meals

consumed
UP TO

4.0

miles

not traveled by car
UP TO

270

minutes

spent exercising
UP TO

310

minutes

spent learning
UP TO

300

minutes

spent outdoors
UP TO

870

minutes

not spent in front of a screen
UP TO

30

neighbors

met
UP TO

769

pounds of CO2

have been saved
UP TO

9.0

zero-waste meals

consumed

Clay's actions

Create Your Own Action

Forage for My Food

I will use the resources below to find where I can forage for my own food locally.

COMPLETED
ONE-TIME ACTION

Community

Meet My Neighbors

I will meet 2 new neighbor(s) each day.

COMPLETED 15
DAILY ACTIONS

Simplicity

Track my Purchases

I will spend 10 minutes each day maintaining a record of all my purchases and learning about my spending habits.

COMPLETED 29
DAILY ACTIONS

Food

Zero-Waste Cooking

I will cook 1 meal(s) with zero-waste each day

COMPLETED 9
DAILY ACTIONS

Food

Reduce Animal Products

I will enjoy 1 meatless meal(s) and/or 0 vegan meal(s) each day this week.

COMPLETED 15
DAILY ACTIONS

Energy

Turn it off

I will keep lights, electronics, and appliances turned off when not using them.

COMPLETED 22
DAILY ACTIONS

Nature

Enjoy the Sunrise/Sunset

I will enjoy the sunrise and/or sunset each day.

COMPLETED 10
DAILY ACTIONS

Health

Exercise Daily

Exercise is a great stress blaster! I will exercise for 30 minute(s) each day.

COMPLETED 9
DAILY ACTIONS

Water

Conserve Toilet Water

I will save up to 12 gallons (45 L) of water a day by flushing only when necessary.

COMPLETED 9
DAILY ACTIONS

Waste

Find Local Recycling Depots

I will find out where to recycle the recyclable items that I can't put in recycling dumpsters or my curbside bin.

COMPLETED
ONE-TIME ACTION

Waste

Go Paperless

I will reduce the amount of paper mail that I receive by 0.11lbs (0.05kg) a day or 3.3lbs (1.6kg) a month by opting into paperless billing, ending unwanted subscriptions and opting out of junk mail.

COMPLETED
ONE-TIME ACTION

Transportation

Work from Home

I will work from home 3 day(s) to avoid my commute's carbon output.

COMPLETED
ONE-TIME ACTION

Transportation

Car Share

I will sign up for a car-sharing service or organize car sharing with my neighbors or classmates to cut down on the number of vehicles on the road.

COMPLETED
ONE-TIME ACTION

Energy

Power Down the Computer

I will power down my computer and monitor when not using it for more than 2 hours, saving up to (1.1) lbs of CO2 each day that I do this.

COMPLETED 22
DAILY ACTIONS

Energy

Switch to Cold Water

I will switch to washing my clothes in cold water, saving up to 133 lbs of CO2 a month and 1,600 lbs of CO2 over the course of the next year.

COMPLETED
ONE-TIME ACTION

Simplicity

Less Screen Time

I will replace 30 minute(s) of screen time each day with other activities.

COMPLETED 29
DAILY ACTIONS

Participant Feed

Reflection, encouragement, and relationship building are all important aspects of getting a new habit to stick.
Share thoughts, encourage others, and reinforce positive new habits on the Feed.

To get started, share “your why.” Why did you join the challenge and choose the actions you did?

Clay Wadman 3/07/2019 10:55 AM

This week I added the daily challenges of exercising daily, enjoying the sunrise and/or sunset, cooking 1 meal a day with zero-waste, and conserving toilet water. I also added the one time challenges of using a resource to find where I can forage for my own food locally and spending at least 10 minutes finding out where to recycle the recyclable items that I can not put in my curbside bin. I challenged myself a little bit more this week and it was exciting. Once again, I surprised myself by how much I liked sticking to more difficult challenges and at my own success rate with completing them.
There are a couple barriers I face in making the most recent challenges a permanent addition to my life. To be able to enjoy either the sunrise or the sunset, I either have to wake up very early, or have available time at the very specific time of sunset. Some days I may simply be too busy to see either, but I could definitely commit to this challenge on a weekly basis rather than a daily basis. Cooking one meal a day with zero waste also has its barriers. Some days I may not have time to cook for myself, let alone cook with zero waste. Conserving toilet water on a daily basis was more difficult than I thought, solely due to the fact that most of the toilets around campus and all the ones in my fraternity house are automatic flushers so it was out of my control.
After having watched the resource video “How to Not Waste Your Extra Vegetable Parts”, I am more willing to make this lifestyle change permanent. It also entices me to learn how to cook better and eat healthier all in the same fell swoop. I have been struggling for quite some time to make myself go and exercise every day. The resource entitled “How to Make Exercise a Daily Habit” really helped me stick to it each and every day. It gave me really good tips such as setting a time to go and sticking to that time until it is an ingrained daily habit. This helped me not shy away from going and putting it off until a later hour which is something
I usually do when attempting to go to the gym. Also, another resource told me that a simple walk through nature could improve my mood by quite a bit so that is something else I would like to adopt as a permanent lifestyle change. After having read the resource entitled “Do I need to flush every time?” I am also quite committed to saving toilet water and making it a permanent lifestyle change. The resource told me that it is not unsanitary nor unhealthy to wait and to flush less often. It also told me that it can save up to 3.2 gallons of water per night, 22.4 gallons per week, 89.6 gallons per month, and 1,075 gallons a year if I flush every third time.

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- Dayane Da Silva 3/17/2019 5:45 PM
  
  Hello Clay Wadman,
  
  It was really interesting reading your post and learning a little bit about your journey with the challenges and discovering how you dealt with the life-style changes. It was great to hear that you began to really challenge yourself, and actually discovered that you liked these challenges more when it was difficult or something that you weren’t normally used to doing it before. I found the challenges you chose to be extremely interesting, especially the waking up early to watch the sun rise and the sun set. I can imagine how that can be extremely challenging to do at times, especially during the days you can enjoy and relax in bed for a bit longer. Although you found difficulties in completing this challenge, I am glad to hear that you found a solution for it instead of giving up and deciding to maybe try to commit to this challenge as a weekly challenge instead of it being daily. Additionally, I can understand that a lot of environmentally friendly options around campus are out of our control, such as automatic flushing. However, maybe adapting these changes at our own homes when we go back can be a good start. So, it is really good that you are learning all of these great things through your resources and can apply to your everyday life when you are not on campus. Additionally, the resources can be a great way to educate ourselves about things we didn’t previously know about, so I am glad you found great things and useful information in your resources. Overall, I really enjoyed reading your post and I hope you found these challenges useful.
  
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Clay Wadman 2/28/2019 10:12 AM

My new challenges this week were the daily challenges of meeting 2 neighbors each day and to enjoy 1 meatless meal each day this week. I also added the time challenge of car sharing, where I have committed to carpooling, in order to cut down the number of vehicles on the road.
This week I stepped up the difficulty of my challenges. It was surprising how fun it was to raise the bar for myself though. I also surprised myself at my ability to eat one meatless meal a day. Personally, I am very much a meat eater. I have too many hamburgers than I would care to admit on a weekly basis, and that is why I chose this difficult challenge.
There are a couple barriers to challenges I chose this week. First, with my daily challenge of meeting two neighbors each day, there is the challenge of there simply not being enough new people I can meet in a natural way on a daily basis. For instance, I already know everybody in my house because I live in my fraternity house. But I have gone about it this week by meeting people in my classes that I do not typically sit next to and purposefully starting a dialogue. In order for me to keep this challenge as a lifestyle staple, I may have to lower the number of people I meet to perhaps a weekly basis rather than a daily basis. The barrier with having one meatless meal a day is most likely just commitment to eating healthier which I am definitely willing to do, although to make this change permanent, I again may have to lower the rate I selected to eat meatless meals. Car sharing was the easiest challenge for me as most of my friends go to the same places as I do. For example, I noticed we all go to Walmart pretty frequently so we started to coordinate trips.
I am definitely willing to meet new people every day. The resource that I read advised that the easiest way to meet people is to simply smile and say hello, which is very easy to do on a college campus where I pass many students each day.
I am also willing to eat less meat on weekly basis. The resource that I read was very interesting. It says that if I eat one less burger per week for a whole year, it is equivalent to taking my car off the road for 320 miles or air-drying my clothes half the time. This fact is pretty astonishing to me personally because of the amount of hamburgers I eat every week and it makes me want to eat less of them.
Similarly, I am really committed to keep up the carsharing habits I built this week. The fact I read in the resource said that ridesharing could save 320 megatons of carbon by 2050. This is astonishing to me and makes me want to make this lifestyle change permanent.

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Clay Wadman 2/21/2019 10:24 AM

It was a bit more stressful to experiment with the added daily and one time challenges this week. Although I again added somewhat easy to do challenges, with the challenges passing over from last week it was more taxing. It was still definitely full-filling to add environmentally friendly habits to my life, but I can see already that with each week it will get more difficult to remember to do each and every one. This was surprising to me at first because the first week went so well, so I was skeptical that two more daily challenges and one more one time challenge would really affect me at all, but it definitely required more daily reminders to keep up with the check-ins.
This week I realized the only real barrier to making these lifestyle changes permanent was commitment. At first I was a little too focused on the new challenges and almost forgot to keep up with my existing challenges. The challenges I added this week were the daily challenges to keep lights, electronics, and appliances turned off when I am not using themand to power down my computer and monitor when not using it for more than 2 hours (saving up to (1.1) lbs of CO2 each day that I do this).I also added the one time challenge to switch to washing my clothes in cold water (saving up to 1,600 lbs of C02 over the course of the next year).It is definitely easy to forget to turn off my computer when it is such a simple task to close it instead of completely powering it off. The barrier of forgetfulness also came into play a lot with the challenge of turning my appliances off, but after a couple days it became routine.
I am definitely willing to make these lifestyle changes permanent. From the resource I read about my lights, electronics, and appliances challenge, I learned that if every United States college student switched from an incandescent light bulb to LED, we would avoid the emissions of a small commercial power plant for the school year. Although it is within my current power to turn off the things that use electricity when not in use, I can not change the lightbulbs in my dorm so it would be difficult to completely adopt this challenge while I am a student. In the resource I read from my turning off my laptop challenge, I learned that screensavers do not save any energy. The only way to prevent unnecessary future charging is to put my laptop into sleep mode. This challenge is something I am definitely willing do adopt permanently. It will not only save energy, but it will help me save laptop battery throughout the day so I will not always have to be searching for an outlet to charge my laptop. From the resource concerning my cold water challenge, I learned that 90% of the energy the washing machine uses goes towards heating the water. I am definitely willing to adopt this challenge on a permanent basis. It is quite easy to simply use cold water when it does the same thing as hot water essentially, but can also save a lot of energy.

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Clay Wadman 2/14/2019 10:06 AM

2/14: It was a lot of fun for me to experiment with these daily and on-time challenges this week. I was a bit nervous at first, but after getting into the habit of doing them every day, it was actually quite easy. A couple things surprised me. First, I was surprised at how little I missed screen time. I replaced 30 minutes of screen time with other activities, and I believe I could have upped that 30 minutes to at least an hour. I did not realize that most of my time spent looking at a screen is pretty needless. What also surprised me was that the little things I buy every week really do add up. The challenge of recording my purchases really made me think about whether I really needed that thing. Even though technically my bank records all my purchases, writing them down for myself made me really think about my weekly costs and what I can cut down to save money (and the environment).
I face pretty much no barriers in adopting the purchasing records challenge permanently other then the fact that I could simply forget. I could also easily cut down on screen time per day and add this lifestyle change permanently although doing it all the time may prove harder than simply doing it for a week. Also choosing to go paperless and opting into paperless billing and ending unwanted subscriptions is something that I could adopt pretty easily into my every day life. I especially want to keep this in my life, because I am constantly forgetting to cancel subscriptions to things that I do not use anymore.
I am definitely willing to make all three of challenges I selected this week permanent. I sort of knew this going into the week though, because I decided to select three things I had already wanted to do, but needed encouragement to stick behind. I definitely still want to cut down my screen time when unit 2 is over and one of the resources I read will help. It gave me many good ideas of activates to do when I am opting to forgo screen time. For example, I can look up and take in my surroundings, go get some exercise, go exploring, have a face to face conversation, get lost in a good book, or even try to find a new hobby! I feel that armed with this knowledge, I can even get some of my friends to buy into cutting down their screen time. I also feel I can make tracking my purchases into a permanent life style change. The resource that I read about this challenge helped me think about the reasoning behind it. For example, the article says, “Imagine cultural anthropologist finds one of your credit card statements in 100 years.” It made me think about what someone would think of me if all they saw was what I bought. To be honest, they would just see someone that bought a lot of Domino’s and video games. But is that what I want someone to think that was all I was? The resource taught me to try and align my purchases more with my personal values and that lesson will help me adopt this challenge into my life. I am also obviously willing to unsubscribe from all the un-necessary subscriptions in my life.

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- Emily Fisher 2/18/2019 2:04 PM
  
  Clay, I enjoyed reading your journal and hearing your honest opinion on such daily and one time challenges. What stood out to me was when you realized just how easy it was to cut out 30 minutes. This is a challenge that I have planned for myself in the weeks coming up, so I am eager to have the same positive experience as you hopefully. I think that most people realize how needless their time on social media is being spent, but it takes an effort to enforce a change to stop looking at it. A problem I faced as well is simply remembering to do things, but a way that we could fix this is by leaving sticky notes on your desk or just a daily reminder in the morning. This constant reminder will soon turn into a natural habit, and hopefully, you can cross this one barrier that leads you to a healthier lifestyle. Opting to go for a walk or do something that doesn’t involve technology will be easier when it’s nicer out as well!
  Something that stuck with me after reading your journal is thinking about what someone in 100 years would say to my bank statement. There are indeed expenses in mine that don’t need to be there, and it has already caused me to think about what I buy more carefully in the future. You are off to a great start in this challenge, and I am excited to see what else you learn!
  
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