Friday, September 23, 2005

No Waste Like Students

I sat down next to the cat to watch the sixth instalment of No Waste Like Home last night. I was particularly interested in watching this episode as being a graduate (well two years ago) I was intrigued to see how well the six students would do. We are also promoting Junkk.com at some fresher fayres over the coming weeks, so I wanted to see if students had changed much since I was a student!

They were accurately portrayed – a typical student house share with lots of mess, music, televisions, computers left on all day, along with the heating, topped off with up to 17 bags of rubbish each week. I found it amusing that the one lad would go down the street and drop off the bags of rubbish to his neighbour’s bins.

I feel strongly that people respond more to visual representation of what they are doing to the planet, and this was justified when Penney took the students to a local landfill site to follow their rubbish. They were shocked by the amount of rubbish dumped there, and it really hit home.

One of the tasks of the students was to convert another friend/business/family to be greener. They opted for a local restaurant. Encouraging the restaurant to recycle their food waste seemed an easy task for the students – and the restaurant still recycles over 80% of its kitchen waste today. It could be argued that the restaurant only did it to look good on TV, but I think that they were inspired by the students. Students are big influences in society, and to get them on board with Junkk.com will be fantastic. At the end of the day, they have loans and other debts. The students on the programme were more than happy to try out money saving ideas with Penney. By also going to Junkk.com they can save some money too. Oh and help save the planet.