When Terry Link, director of the Office of Campus Sustainability, speaks to MSU classrooms about steps students can take to be more environmentally friendly, he asks the question, "How many of you have your computer sitting on, right now?"

When most of the students raise their hands, he makes a projection: If the students in the class were representative of the about 17,000 students living on campus, then they are wasting up to a million watts of power an hour — depending on whether their computer is in sleep mode or not.

What does it mean to waste a million watts of power an hour? It means MSU's T.B. Simon Power Plant is burning coal into the air for nothing — releasing carbon dioxide, a damaging greenhouse gas.

In the 2005-06 fiscal year, Link said the plant burned 252,043 tons of coal, or more than 1 million pounds a day.

"Carbon dioxide is at levels that we haven't seen in hundreds of thousands of years, and it's increasing quickly," Link said. "The bottom line is we should be cutting (carbon dioxide levels). The faster they go down, the better."

The solution to the million-watt waste is as simple as setting your computer to sleep mode, Link said. It's one of many steps that prove

you don't need to buy a solar-powered car to be environmentally friendly. In fact, most of the following steps will save you money.

Light bulbs

If you live in a dorm, your world is already illuminated by the glow of florescent lights. But for those who live off-campus, the benefits of using compact florescent light bulbs, or CFLs, are unknown to many.

Compact florescent light bulbs not only use a quarter of the energy to produce the same amount of light as incandescent bulbs, they also last up to 10 times longer, according to Aileen Gow, executive director of Urban Options, 405 Grove St., a nonprofit organization that educates people about environmental services.

Compact florescents last 8,000 to 10,000 hours, or five to eight years, depending how often you use them, Gow said. Incandescent light bulbs last about 800 hours, or about half a year. Over the lifetime of one bulb, you will save almost $50, Gow said.

Lansing Community College sophomore Samantha Frick said her housemates at the Raft Hill co-op replaced all the incandescent bulbs in the house with florescents at the beginning of the semester.

"It makes me feel good knowing that we're not completely messing up the planet," she said. "I just think it's the responsible way of living, and I wouldn't go about it any other way."

Thermostat and windows

Even simpler than replacing light bulbs is getting into the habit of latching windows when you close them in order to keep the heat of your house or apartment sealed in.

"For old homes with drafty windows, applying caulk around your window edges and insulating plastic sheets over them will keep the cold out and the heat in," Gow said.

Any steps taken will make a difference on your electric bill, Gow said.

"You can do other things like turn down the thermostat at night instead of running out of the house with the temperature up to 70 degrees," she said. "If you're gone four hours or longer, it's worth turning off. You can reduce your energy bill by at least 10 percent."

Buy local

Mitra Sticklen, an interdisciplinary studies in social science and environmental policy senior, said although many people don't realize it, they can help the environment by purchasing food from local sources such as the East Lansing Food Co-Operative or from the Student Organic Farm.

"Consider this — most food travels 1,500 miles before reaching your plate. Think about all the fossil fuels being burned just to ship it."

Local restaurants that support organic and local food options include the Green River Café, BTB, Travelers Club International Restaurant & Tuba Museum, and Magdalena's Tea House.

Urban planning senior Ashley Miller said she buys local and organic foods because the process does not use chemicals and supports local agriculture.

"People don't have to feel like they're giving anything up," she said. "It's a lifestyle — appreciating your own backyard and protecting it."

Recycle

For a one-time fee of $5.50, off-campus residents can purchase a recycling bin from the East Lansing Department of Public Works. The bins are emptied weekly.

"Recycling really comes down to convenience," said Dave Smith, an environmental specialist for the city of East Lansing. "If you can provide a convenient service, people will use it. I think that is why we have 75 percent to 80 percent of households in East Lansing do it."

In 2005, the city of East Lansing recycled about 4 million pounds of material, or about 235 garbage trucks worth.

Recycling is not convenient in the dorms. Even though there's a paper recycling program, there is not yet a campuswide program that recycles bottles and cans. Students can drop off their plastic bottles, usually identified as No. 1 and No. 2 on the bottom of the bottle, and aluminum cans at the Public Works Department, 1800 E. State Road.

"It's not easy to do, and we're more of a convenience society," Miller said of the current recycling situation in the dorms.

She is part of a task force that is working to bring an on-campus recycling program to MSU. The task force is part of an environmental stewardship program under President Lou Anna K. Simon's Boldness By Design initiative. On the Vice President for Finance and Operations' Web site, the stewardship's goals are stated as reducing the flows of materials and wastes and greenhouse gases "in the near future."

Miller said she thinks there would be a high percentage of participation if an on-campus recycling program were implemented.

"I think people would change their ways if a system was accessible and easy to use," she said.

Reduce

If students can't find the time to make the trip with their recyclables, they can still reduce the amount of garbage they create, said Raman Agrawal, a psychology senior who works for Urban Options. He said bottled water is one of the easiest things students could cut back on.

Argrawal said students cut the garbage they produce dramatically if they stopped buying bottled water, which creates factory waste, cost from transportation and then recycling costs. With the campus lacking a recycling program that includes bottles and cans, students are needlessly filling landfill space when they could be using a water filter.

With the help of their WRA 135 class, Agrawal helped start Grassroots Recycling, a program that distributed recycling bins to Case Hall and picked up the bottles and cans that students left every week during last spring semester.

The weekly pickup averaged 300 pounds, Argrawal said, and most of the plastic items were water bottles. In East Lansing's recycling program, Smith said about 80 percent of the No. 1 plastic bottles that are recycled come from bottled water.

The numbers suggest the majority of plastic waste produced in dorms, and East Lansing comes from bottled water.

"The bottled water market has cashed in on a trend which arose from our negligence," Argrawal said.