Last weekend, members of the Colgate community gathered together for the fifth annual Green Summit, which provided opportunities to discuss ways Colgate can become a more environmentally friendly campus. The summit annually elicits quality initiatives to reduce the university’s impact on the local environment and showcases the creativity of Colgate students by bringing those initiatives to life. One of the many issues that was discussed at the summit involved limiting the amount of paper waste created by mass campus distributions, under which category The Maroon-News would undoubtedly fall.

I would be ignorant to say that the Maroon-News is at its peak when it comes to being environmentally friendly. In the past, there have been piles of unread newspapers around campus or lost issues blowing in the wind outside houses and dorms. For the most part, this is due to the difficultly of accurately predicting how many students will read the newspaper every week. However, we are attempting to limit our environmental impact as well.

Every few years, the newspaper staff tries to recalculate our readership level in an attempt to curb printing excessive amounts of papers.

This semester, The Maroon-News staff has been putting together a survey that will be given out at Coop tables all of this week. One of the goals of this survey is to identify the extent of our readership and from which locations students get the newspaper, so that we can print fewer copies of the newspaper each week and still reach out to all the students, faculty and townspeople that enjoy reading The Maroon-News on a weekly basis.

As the school’s only newspaper, The Maroon-News should be at the forefront of the campaign to limit the amount of paper waste on campus, and I hope that this survey and its results can help to lower our environmental impact on the Colgate community. In the process, I hope that this may encourage other student groups to do so as well, so that the piles of unread flyers sitting outside the Mailroom can be a thing of the past.

Please stop by the Coop this week to fill out our quick survey, so that we can better serve the Colgate community in the future and hopefully avoid the unused stacks of newspapers sitting around campus every week. The campus will look better, and we can all feel better about not wasting our paper supplies.