Ellington

About a dozen students from the UW’s Earth Club came together yesterday afternoon to wage a war against the more than 2,600 paper-towel dispensers on campus by placing a sticker on every single one.

Earth Club president, Vincent Gonzalez, has been working with faculty and building services to reduce on-campus paper-towel usage and decrease the nearly $180,000 that the campus spent on paper towels in the last academic year.

“There are more than 2,600 dispensers on campus and only a few of us, so it’s going to be an ongoing process,” Gonzalez said. “We have an extensive list of every bathroom on campus from building services, but it will probably take about two weeks.”

Gonzalez said that the program, called “These Come From Trees,” is just a form of educational graffiti on campus and that every sticker that they use can save up to 100 pounds of paper a year.

The group put stickers on dispensers in north-campus bathrooms yesterday, hitting Kane Hall and the Quad, and Earth Club will be putting stickers on more dispensers over the next couple of weeks.

Earth Club has been working with Professor Sarah Keller in the chemistry department to help get acknowledgement from building and custodial services, so the stickers are allowed up and can stay up permanently.

“It’s a three-tier process,” Keller said. “First, we need to work with facilities, so the stickers aren’t perceived as a type of graffiti. Second, we needed to get the sticker donation, and finally, we needed the manpower and commitment from students.”

Keller said that it really has been a product of student thinking to get the project off the ground, and it’s environmental thinking that will last.

Earth Club needed a small donation of a few hundred dollars for the stickers, but Keller said that those funds could be transferred into thousands in savings based on past results from “These Come From Trees.”

“Especially in these economic times, a small gift can make a huge impact, and we’ve been working on how to leverage a small investment into a something much larger,” Keller said.

Gonzalez and Keller have been working closely with Gene Woodard, director of building services, for the past few months to help track the impact that they hope the stickers will make.

“I’m 100 percent supportive of this campaign,” Woodard said. “I’m curious to see what the impact is, but it has the potential to greatly raise awareness and reduce costs.”

Woodard is going to help monitor paper-towel usage on campus over the next few months and said that results may be seen as early as January. He also said that the stickers will be placed on the dispensers permanently and that they shouldn’t interfere with custodial staff at all.

Previous sticker campaigns in other schools, mainly primary schools, have shown a decrease in usage of paper towels by as much as 29 percent, Gonzalez said.

“If we can get even a one-percent reduction in usage, that would be incredible for a campus of 40,000,” Keller said.

Reach reporter Nick Visser at news@dailyuw.com.