Our Success story
The Drink Responsibly Campaign started as an idea in a classroom. It has evolved into a campus-wide campaign, with a presence in on-campus cafes and online. This campaign started with researching the effects of using disposable coffee cups. We learned about the sheer waste of coffee cups and how much unnecessary energy was wasted using them everyday by millions of people. If we could find a way to get the word out about the wastefulness of disposable cups and get people to limit their use of them, we might be able to put a dent in the waste caused by disposable cups. We hung posters advertising cafe deals on campus and offered punchcards to encourage the use of reusable cups.
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Furthermore, we hosted an awareness event in one of the campus cafes. We advertised with posters and posts on Facebook. At the event, we gave away free buttons with the Drink Responsibly logo on them, as well as punchcards. We showed a video (part of this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html and a purchased video) and had a musical performance by a student volunteer.
Results
Throughout this project we worked closely with the company that provides the dining services at Loyola University Chicago. With their help, we were able to gain access to reports on the number of punchcards that were taken from each cafe and the number of reusable mugs purchased from the cafes. With these reports, we found that all of the punchcards put out at the beginning of the week were taken! This means that in one week 250 cards were taken by students! We hope that these students take advantage of the punchcard deal and continue to use their reusable mugs! Out of the 5 cafe locations, there were 6 reusable mugs sold. We hope that this number increases throughout the rest of the school year, as students learn the benefits of reusable mugs.