Sustain Mizzou plans button campaign

Students would earn buttons for bike riding, eating locally and other green efforts.

By Megan Swieca

Published Oct. 15, 2010

Sustain Mizzou has created a campus-wide campaign to promote sustainability by rewarding students for sustainable acts.

“It’s important to connect the general campus community to sustainability issues and bring that to the forefront,” Sustain Mizzou President Tina Casagrand said.

Rewards will be in the form of distributable buttons, which are specially designed to represent different aspects of sustainability, such as alternative transportation, recycling, energy conservation and water conservation.

“These four are kind of the lowest-hanging fruit that people can commit to easily and will be comfortable with doing,” Casagrand said.

Doing things like riding your bike from off campus, volunteering with Mizzou Dashboard, recycling or using a laundry drying rack can earn you a button, Casagrand said.

For less easily monitored acts, like energy or water conservation, people can sign commitments with the organization.

More buttons will eventually be added, possibly including ones for eating local food or getting educated on environmental issues.

Sustain Mizzou plans to borrow the Craft Studio’s button maker to assemble the buttons. Ott said the buttons were designed in the Student Design Center. Both the Craft Studio and the Design Center are auxiliaries of the Missouri Students Association.

Samuel Ott, the project leader of the button campaign, said he hopes to ultimately make the system more complex and turn it into a levels of achievement system. By earning one button you can get the next level of achievement.

This program was initially created by the students in Director of Environmental Studies Program Jan Weaver’s classes that focused on helping MU become more sustainable.

Weaver said the students spent the first third of the class seeing how MU worked by touring and educating themselves on systems such as the MU power plant and the campus recycling process.

The rest of the class was spent brainstorming ideas to improve sustainability. The students decided to focus on other students’ behavior and choices in regard to sustainability, Weaver said.

“The goal was to come up with a project that would get students at MU to be more sustainable,” Weaver said. “Hopefully there will be a critical mass of students that will like the idea, and that will be enough to move the rest of campus students toward sustainability.”

Sustain Mizzou’s goal is to create and distribute 1,200 buttons, which will reach about one in every 30 students.

“It doesn’t really matter if people strive for the buttons, as long as they strive for the meaning behind it,” Ott said.