Sustainability at Rensselaer

Since its founding in May 2005, ESW-RPI has hosted a number of projects with varying degrees of success. In cases where a project was unsuccessful, it was mostly due to a shortage of members since the club was relatively new on campus. Historically, attendance at meetings has also been low, but the start of the Fall 2007 semester saw a record high of 20 or so in attendance… which means… people have been getting the word out! Good work everybody and keep talking about ESW! Invite your friends too!A possible reason for low attendance at meetings may be the fact that meetings tend to center around a lot of “talking” and not a lot of “doing,” which sometimes leads members to stop coming because they feel they aren’t doing anything. Also, an overemphasis on fundraising in past years has lowered interest in club participation. As a result, ESW-RPI is now Union funded as of Fall 2007 and looks forward to changing its focus toward making RPI sustainable rather than placing most of the emphasis on raising money to send overseas. If all goes well, the first full-year budget will be approved for the 2008-2009 school year, with big plans for interactive workshops, public awareness campaigns, and speaker forums.

ESW-RPI’s vision is twofold:

1. To make RPI known for sustainability - both in campus operation and in the educational curriculum, especially the engineering program;
2. To promote sustainable development in small towns and villages in third world nations by partnering with local communities and applying sustainable, design-based solutions to help meet that community’s specific needs, whatever they may be. This is essentially the mission of the National ESW organization with which we are affiliated.

Our Mission Statement is “to pool the knowledge, skills, and experience of RPI and the surrounding community to discover and solve environmental, social, and economic problems, recognizing the importance of sustainability.”^[1]

Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) is a student-run organization focused on solving environmental, social, and economic problems, both in the surrounding community and the developing world. Ecologic and ESW are working very closely on a number of projects, including the Recycling Project.