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• Useful Tips

What Faculty & Staff Can Do

Answers to questions about new equipment, resource use, who to contact and more are below.

Recycling in the Office**                                                                                       

• Aluminum (PDF)

• Aseptic (PDF)                           

• Batteries Do not throw batteries into the trash. Many batteries have hazardous electrolytes that cannot be safely or legally disposed of in the trash.
  
  Please return batteries to the Environmental Health & Safety Office in Facilities Management. If your department generates significant numbers of waste batteries, consider setting up a central collection area in your department.
  
  For more details, contact the Environmental Health & Safety Office at 585-2458.                                                            
• Bottles & Cans Bins to recycle bottles and cans are located in public areas throughout the academic and administrative buildings.                                                    
• Paper In each office, there is a blue desk side recycling bin next to each wastebasket. Please place all of your recyclable paper into this bin.
  
  Your building custodian then empties this bin and sends it on its way to the next step to being recycled.                                                                                                          
• Computer Electronics College-owned obsolete computer equipment (including computers, monitors, printers, peripherals and media) is managed as standard ITS protocol when upgrading computers in offices.
  
  After erasing all data from the computer, usable computers are donated to local charities as part of the ITS's Town-Gown program. Items that cannot be donated to local charities are picked up from ITS by Facilities Management and shipped to a computer recycling vendor to be recycled for their scrap value.
  
  For more information about ITS upgrades, contact your department's systems coordinator (or whomever oversees assets for your department), or contact ITS at 585-3770.

• Corrugated Cardboard To recycle cardboard boxes in your office, please remove all contents & packaging material, flatten the box, mark it "recycling" and leave them next to your deskside paper recycling bin.                     
• Plastics (PDF)

• Printer & Toner Cartridges: If your office or department purchases their printers and copiers from the campus fleet, visit the ITS toner recycling page for information on recycling used toner cartridges.                                
  

**Note: Please do your part and take the time to find the right container for your throw-away item! Trash/drink containers put into a paper recycling bin, for example, means the whole bin of paper is considered contaminated and gets thrown in the trash instead of being recycled.

Multi-Functional Devices

The jungle of wires and appliances in offices is an energy and administrative nightmare. The energy draw from office appliances adds up as separate copiers, faxes and printers are powered up and used all day. The purchasing office offers the opportunity to replace old, less-efficient fleet copiers with a sleek, multi-functional device (MFD).

Benefits of MFDs include:

• One device quickly copies, duplex prints, faxes, and scans to e-mail
• A single machine reduces energy use and is more efficient
• Lower toner, paper and maintenance costs can save department money

For more information that may save your department money, visit the Purchasing Office's Web site.

Transportation, Parking Opt-Outs and Carpooling

• Zipcar Smith has a contract with Zipcar to provide a fleet of fuel-efficient hybrid cars for renting by the hour. This is a great way to get somewhere quickly and reduce parking congestion on campus. Fuel cards come with the cars, which live at the Smith Parking Garage near the ground floor entrance. For more information, visit the Zipcar Web site.

• Parking Opt-Out Program Smith's Opt-Out Program pays eligible employees to travel to and from work without driving a single-occupant (SOV) vehicle, an initiative to help ease the parking demand on campus. The voluntary Opt-Out Program encourages faculty and staff to find alternate ways to commute, such as car-pooling, ridesharing, bicycling, walking and public transit. For more information, visit Public Safety's Web site.

• Carpooling Program Smith has joined ranks with the UMass Rideshare program to provide an up-to-date forum for people who need rides or are looking to offer one. Learn more at Public Safety's Web site.

Purchasing Office

The Purchasing Office at Smith College works with the Office of Environmental Sustainability to find ways to provide you with access to sustainable materials for the office. In addition to the energy and resources saving measures of smart purchasing, the Purchasing Office can offer bargaining power because of the volume of purchases. To find out how to get affordable supplies for your office and take a look at the vendor contracts, check out the purchasing Web site.

Greener Events

The Smith Events Management Office has many ideas for reducing the impact of on-campus events.