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| Compost produced in the zero waste campus project at one of the audited colleges in Mumbai |
Last week, I briefly talked about the ICOR-Samuchit Green Audit Tool for Educational Institutes. You can read the post here.
Green Audit will help a college or a university department or a training institute to understand and introspect on its dependence as well as impact on local and global environment. More practically, it will show the institute ways and means by which it can make its processes more efficient and therefore also more economical. And last but not the least, green audit is now one of the requirements in the NAAC accreditation process of the University Grants Commission.
Our Green Audit Tool has two aspects which are normally not part of an environmental audit process. Today, I would like to elaborate a bit on this.
As we were designing the process specifically for educational institutes, we felt that in addition to the environment-friendliness of processes and systems, we should also examine and document the institute's activities focused on imparting knowledge and information about environmental issues. So far we have found that colleges do much more than the mandatory Environmental Science course. We also saw that different departments organise events, projects, activities, etc., in the framework of their courses but focused on the environment. When we present the documentation of the entire institute collectively, the common reaction is - wow, we had no idea so many environment focused activities have been going on in our institute! This in itself motivates and encourages people to collaborate more for more effective activities.
We also encourage college administrations to invite employees and students to share information about their own individual initiatives such as terrace gardening, adaptation of renewable energy devices at home, use of bicycle, greening of neighbourhood, or environment-focused hobbies, etc. Documenting these initiatives too as a part of the audit is an attempt to focus some limelight on these individuals, and also to see in what way the institute has/can influence lifestyle choices of individuals connected with it.
For more information, please contact: Deepika Singh, ICOR on deepika62001@yahoo.co.in or write to me on pkarve@samuchit.com.
Priyadarshini Karve
Director
Samuchit Enviro Tech
#BeModernBeResponsibleBeRespectful
Samuchit Enviro Tech. samuchit@samuchit.com www.samuchit.com
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