• CCSI Home
• Initiatives
• Application
• Contact
• More sustainability@claremont

2008 Initiatives

• Claremont Colleges Tree Canopy
• Solar Technologies for the Claremont Colleges
• Scripps College Food and Sustainability Community Project

2007 Initiatives

• Greening the Office Supply Stream:
  • Major findings
  • Recommendations
  • Virtual catalog
  • Final report
  • Presentation slides
  • Resources
  • Team members
• Urban Ecosystem Analysis Using GIS
• 5-College Environmental Audit

Major Findings

Greening the Claremont Colleges’ Office Supply Stream

• The Colleges vary in the degree to which office supply purchasing is centralized. While some colleges purchase most supplies centrally, in others most office supplies are purchased by individual departments; thus total consumption could not be determined for all colleges.
• The Colleges office supplies are most often purchased from Inland Office Products and Office Depot.
• The office supplies purchased in greatest volume (and thus those that were the focus of this study) are:
  • Copy paper and other paper products (e.g., legal pads, Post-it® notes, envelopes)
  • Ink and toner cartridges
  • Writing utensils (especially pens)
• Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, and Pomona Colleges together purchase over 17,000 reams of copy paper per year. The fraction of copy paper with recycled content varies widely among the colleges — approximately 96% of Pomona College’s copy paper has recycled content, while Claremont McKenna uses essentially no paper with recycled content.
• Administrative directives can have major impacts. Pomona College’s 2003 non-mandatory directive to buy recycled paper whenever possible was cited by administrative assistants as their main motivator (at least initially) for buying paper with recycled content.
• The copy paper used by Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, and Pomona Colleges together consumes more than 50 tons of wood and 600 million BTUs of energy, and produces more than 90,000 pounds of greenhouse gases, 300,000 gallons of wastewater, and 30,000 pounds of solid waste.
• Pomona’s use of predominantly recycled copy paper saves approximately 5 tons of wood, 19 million BTUs of energy, 2,500 lbs of CO₂, 10,000 gallons of wastewater, and 1,300 lbs of solid waste every year compared to using paper with no recycled content.
• Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, and Pomona Colleges together purchase over 750 ink and toner cartridges annually. Nearly 97% of the components of the average toner cartridge can be reused or recycled. Most offices appear to recycle at least some of their cartridges, but there are no centralized recycling programs or records.
• In 2006-2007 Harvey Mudd College purchased more than 2000 pens, 300 pencils, 900 markers, and 200 highlighters from Office Depot.
• Determining the precise environmental impacts of writing utensils was not possible. “Upstream” impacts are vary immensely depending on the processes used to make a particular implement (e.g., ballpoint vs. stick pen). “Downstream” impacts (e.g., how much office waste is recycled or trashed) could also not be determined accurately in the summer months, when no classes are in session. Nontheless, “better” and “worse” alternatives could be determined.

More detailed analysis of the findings is included in the final report .