From January 15th to February 11th, Williston participated in the Green Cup Challenge. The GreenCup Challenge is a school to school competition to see which school could save the most energy during the four week interval, with the hope to instill sustainable habits in the students. At Williston, the Sustainable Life Club also narrows the competition to make it a dorm to dorm competition. Although Williston’s data will not be processed and posted until later this week, the final data for the dorm competitions are in.

The amount of energy used per week by dorm is compared with the amount of energy used from a baseline of three years during the month of January and February. Conant and Sawyer had switched their heating system last year, which helped them use less electricity.

Though only four dorms in the first two weeks were saving energy (Memorial Hall, Conant and Sawyer, Hathaway, and Logan), improvements were seen in seven dorms in the last week. Below are the top three dorms for each week.

Week 1  First place: Conant and Sawyer   Second place: Memorial Hall     Third place: Logan

Week 2  First place: Conant and Sawyer   Second place: Memorial Hall     Third place: Logan

Week 3  First place: Conant and Sawyer   Second place: Memorial Hall     Third place: 194

Week 4  First place: Conant and Sawyer   Second place: Memorial Hall     Third place: Reed

Conant and Sawyer held onto first place throughout the four weeks. They will continue to have possession of the Green Cup Flag until March break.

Memorial Hall earns second place after continually saving energy for all four weeks.

Combining the amount of energy saved from Memorial Hall and Conant and Sawyer, a total of 3,480 lbs of carbon dioxide were saved throughout the competition. 

Logan and 194 continued to switch back and forth for third place throughout the competition. Reed, or the day students’ building for the competition, gained an honorable mention after going from 27 kwh saved to 147 kwh saved in the last week.

All of the dorms in the last week, excluding data that was transcribed incorrectly from Hathaway, the school has saved a total of 1,076 lbs of carbon dioxide.

Although a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for the Green Cup Challenge was seen in the dorms, the especially cold month may have contributed to the loss of energy that occurred in some dorms.

With the new solar lamps distributed to each dorm, we hope that this enthusiasm will remain after the Green Cup Challenge has ended, and that students are inspired to help save energy outside of the competition as well.

The final results for Williston, in the school to school competition, will be released later this week.