Unplug

When determining what my sustainability challenge should be it took me quite a bit of consideration until I found one I thought to be manageable and meaningful. My challenge of choice is one easily within my “power”, if you will, to change. Idle chargers are something we take for granted, we do not realize what sort of impact plugging in when a device is not utilizing the charger has. As a matter of fact I was fairly unaware of the issue until it was mentioned in class and I realized this is a great challenge for college students to take on. As a college student I find some major ways of reducing carbon footprint to be somewhat difficult since we don’t exactly utilize these sources such as cars or individual homes. However, I find this challenge to be extremely practical for college students considering the numerous chargers we use for laptops, phones, iPads, iPods, etc… Though this may be a small change in my daily routine, and though it may have a rather small effect on reducing energy consumption, I still believe it to be a useful challenge. If people began to practice this into their daily routine in larger numbers, I believe it really could make a difference in our energy consumption as a whole.

I think it will be challenge at first to make this behavior habit, but once I start placing it into my daily routine I believe it will just be natural for me to unplug chargers along with the devices they charge. I am hoping although this is a small practice, that it will become habitual, so that through small changes like these I can make small differences that will hopefully add up. If others in the class take on some of the same challenges there may even be a chance that our sustainability challenges catch some attention from our friends, and we may inadvertently get a few more people taking on our challenges.