Cristina Castillo Cerdà (MBA06)

If you have not been on campus for the past few months, visiting CEIBS will bring a surprise. A new color has been added to the distinctive white-and-gray façade of the school. That color is green!

Throughout the campus, in the classrooms, the discussion rooms, the cafeteria and even in the bathrooms, the campus has been covered in small green stickers urging CEIBS students and visitors to make the school a green campus.

What do we mean by Green Campus? The Green Campus Initiative originated with a group of MBA06 students who had taken the Ethics course in Term 2. We realized that the school is doing a great job in teaching about environmental best practices but we saw that day-to-day practices at CEIBS could be improved significantly from an environmental point of view. We decided to practice some of the good things we had learned in class.

Since there are more than 1 billion people in China, and fewer than 1,000 at CEIBS, will the Green Campus Initiative make a difference? Of course! CEIBS has great potential to improve environmental protection in China. If good environmental practices are implemented and enforced at our school, students will transfer these insights and practices to their future business organizations. In addition, EMBA students are very influential and can certainly change many things within the organizations they manage. CEIBS is a great platform to show that environmentally friendly practices are good for both our society and the long term bottom line of our business.

As we learned in our Organizational Behavior class, change is difficult to bring about. Therefore, we looked for support. We drafted a proposal to establish a permanent Green Campus Committee comprised of Dean Rolf Cremer, External Communications Director Laurie Underwood, Professor Henri-Claude de Bettignies, Logistics Department Representative Sharon Tang and eight student representatives.

The Green Campus Initiative is not simply a student activity or club. The forming of the Green Campus Committee shows that CEIBS is committed to making the dream of a Green Campus come true. Our goal is that the initiative becomes a permanent part of the CEIBS mission, and that it can be handed over year by year to the new incoming students.

Many people have shown support for our initiative. In fact, Dean Cremer has signed our mission statement, which is: The objective of the Green Campus Initiative is to stimulate, facilitate and guide CEIBS to become an exemplary institution in sustainable and environmental issues. CEIBS is committed to undertaking actions to create a Green Campus".

For our first project, we decided to focus on recycling and energy saving. With help from the Logistics and Marcom departments, we designed a Green Campus logo, then printed 1,350 Green Campus stickers and posters reminding people to "Save Energy ? Turn off the Lights," "Close the Door," "Save Water" and "Use Scratch Paper". These were posted throughout the campus, in every classroom and discussion room, doorway, and bathroom sink.

We also set up 20 Green Point recycling stations on campus, with posters designating new recycling bins for paper and containers. After two months of use, the system is working fairly well, but true success will require everyone to make full use of the recycling bins.

Next steps for Green Campus Initiative:

• Train security personnel, and all users, to regularly turn off unused lights.
• Track recycling volume month by month and urge students, faculty, and visitors to recycle.
• Organize environmental activities such as recycling games for children during CEIBS Family Day.
• Cooperate with the CEIBS Beijing Campus, which recently launched an environmental initiative among its EMBA students.

In the long term, we hope to work with the school to review and improve our purchasing policies in order to instill environmentally friendly practices.