Southwestern College Deets Library Becoming More Environmentally Friendly

The director and staff of the Southwestern College Harold and Mary Ellen Deets Library are seeking out ways to be more environmentally friendly.

“We are trying to take a page from the financial aid department here at Southwestern, they have gone paperless,” says Veronica McAsey, director of the Deets Library. “This triggered something with us. We wanted to see how to handle the consumption of paper in our office and tried out a couple of ideas.”

For Earth Day 2010 (April 22) the library celebrated by not providing paper coffee cups for the day. Its success in encouraging patrons to use reusable cups demonstrated that the library does not need to provide paper coffee cups next year. This will save about 5,000 cups from the landfill and $600 of the library’s budget.

The library also started to use the bookseller Better World Books for some of its book purchases. Sixty-nine used books were bought from Better World Books, which saved these books from the landfill. The purchases also supported world literacy programs with a portion of the sale going to various organizations. Approximately 350 withdrawn library books or donated textbooks were shipped to Better World Books to be sold online or recycled. A portion of the sales funded Worldfund, a Latin American literacy program that the library selected to sponsor.