This year The Howler has made it a goal to be more conscious of its environmental footprint as a newspaper (see: The Howler Online!). As a small community within our campus, we wanted to extend the same challenge to the entire student body with some tips and tricks to dramatically reduce any needless waste we have on campus!

Reusable water bottles: A quick and easy way for everyone to significantly reduce their plastic footprint by a lot is with reusable water bottles. Whether it be for water or coffee, reusable water bottles will make your life a million times easier and save the environment so do yourself (and the Earth) a huge favor and get yourself a nice (preferably metal) water bottle. Plus, now you have an excuse to get all those cute stickers you’ve been wanting.

Containers instead of Ziplocs: Because single-use plastics are one of the biggest reasons the climate crisis is as bad as it is, you can do a lot for the Earth by limiting your use of them as much as possible. A great way to do that is by bringing your food in containers rather than Ziploc bags. You’d be helping the Earth a lot and saving money in the long run by not having to constantly buy Ziploc bags throughout the year!

Keeping your car off at lunch: Calling all the juniors and seniors! Sitting in your cars at lunch is pretty standard around our campus. It’s true that the California heat is like no other, but instead of turning on your car to run the air conditioning (and killing your battery along with the environment) try rolling down your windows or sitting in someone’s open trunk to stay cool.

Typing notes instead of writing them: One of our biggest wastes as students that we don’t really think about is our notes. Of course, we need them while in school but as soon as the year is over, none of us are particularly attached to those two page notes on the French Revolution we took that one time and end up throwing them out. If you take those two pages and multiply them by all the school days, the number of classes you’re taking and, finally, the entire student body of Northwood alone, you end up with a ridiculous amount of wasted paper. Instead of continuing the waste train, this year try typing your notes if you have a laptop that you can bring to school. If even a third of our student body began typing their notes, our collective waste would considerably shrink.