Facebook contest putting greener face on UNBC

Right now like the rest of the city, UNBC is buried under a blanket of white.

While it might not be apparent under all that snow, the school on the hill is gaining a reputation as one of Canada's greenest universities.

Its $22-million bioenergy heating project that began operating a year ago now provides 85 per cent of the heat the campus needs, and UNBC is also looking into ways to use wood waste to produce electricity.

To try to generate ideas for new green initiatives, UNBC is turning to users of the social network and has launched a Facebook contest. For the next two weeks leading up to UNBC's fifth annual Green Day celebration on Tuesday, March 20, entrants are being asked to send in their submissions.

"As UNBC's environmental club, Students for a Green University's mandate is to educate, motivate, and inspire UNBC students, staff, and faculty to make environmentally-positive changes individually as well as at the University-level," said Cam Bell, associate director of campus sustainability for the Northern Undergraduate Students Society.

"One of the things we really appreciate about UNBC is the ability students and the whole community have to make things happen, so I'm hoping to see one of the submissions implemented in the next few years."

The winning entry will receive $1,000 in prize money from Integris Credit Union and has the potential to have the idea officially sanctioned as UNBC's next green project. Five other contest entrants will receive green gift baskets from the UNBC bookstore.

The first day the contest resulted in 33 green suggestions, including: a ban on all bottled water and paper cups from the campus; conversion of all washing machines at the student residence to cold-water only operation; collecting kinetic energy from people's footsteps and converting it into electricity; and building an aquaponics greenhouse at UNBC.

"Empowering the UNBC population is appropriate as Canada's green university," said UNBC president George Iwama. "It provides the opportunity to get involved in purposeful environmental change, and links our current and former student community with UNBC's mandate to 'walk the walk.'"

UNBC's Facebook green contest can be found at http://on.fb.me/xfxCxS.