With growing consciousness toward the environment, people are wondering how they can go about being more ecologically friendly.
There are plenty of places where one can look for information on how to be greener. The story is that green technology has been shifting into the mainstream. To be frank, green technology is a great thing. The one aspect that turns quite a few people away from it is up-front cost.
It is expensive to go through the conversion from current energy sources to sustainable energy. However, in the long run the costs shifts specifically to maintenance. After the installation and configuration, the cost for being green ends up saving money. It also reduces the cost of utilities because it would be working off of cheaper, abundant resources (water, wind, solar, etc.) for things like energy and heating.
The school, as with the rest of society, needs to start thinking about environmental causes in a long run, full-picture view. There is a level of responsibility that everyone must take because the environment is linked into everything else. Poor environment leads to poor health, which leads to a drop in economic productivity. A lack of economic productivity causes the loss of jobs, which leads to desperate crime and conflict. In the case of desperate crimes, there are things like arson that could happen. Arson could cause environmental damage as an incidental occurrence. So can different forms of eco-terrorism. Though the damage would be minimal, it would still happen. Desperate crime and conflict could lead to more incidental environmental damage, thus the degrading cycle of society is renewed.
NEIU recently added Sustainability to the list of Strategic Goals that students, staff, faculty and administration have been meeting to compile. The purpose of these meetings is to make a list of goals to improve the NEIU environment and experience for everyone.
So what would the benefit be of NEIU shifting to more sustainable energy? The drawback is that if funding can’t be received from the state/federal government, alumni or the board of trustees, tuition would have to rise. Seeing as how tuition naturally rises, as with general cost of living, the tuition might be well spent on making the school less expensive to power. Tuition would have to rise for the installation.
However, after installation, maintenance costs are dramatically less expensive. This means that if the school doesn’t decide to lower tuition, the money made through tuition can go to increase pay for professors and faculty. It can also give more funding to student organizations so that they can either hold bigger events or just more events for the fun and benefit of the campus community.