In every living places people consume a lot of things and this leads to increase their ecological footprint. So, I thought about this and I decided to reduce my carbon footprint. First of all, I live in a dormitory and in dormitory the ratio of consuming something is more than in houses because people don’t care how much they waste especially if they live in public places. In this week I tried to raise awareness about this consuming. Firstly, I started to decrease my consuming and then I recommended this to my friends. First, when I saw an open tap, I closed it and I started to use less water than before. Also, as its known, in public living spaces (like dormitory) people don’t turn off the lights. This week I turned off all the lights that weren’t used at that time. If everyone starts with such small steps, we can decrease our consuming and we can be more aware of this problem.

Şükran Oksoy 120110152 cat4/bat4

Although Abdullah Gül University is 4th wordwide in the criteria of “Sustainable Cities and Communities”, I think, the campus itself has a crucial problems ecologically. Especially unnecesery use of electrical energy is a big problem but it can be said that there is a big progress compared the previous years when all the lights in the campus including classrooms and the streetlights were switched on even they were unnecessary. However, some problems are still in existence and they should be fixed.

Every single air conditioner in the steel building and warehouse works 7 days 24 hours. However none of the rooms / classrooms except study areas, architecture studios and security areas is used out of working hours.

Another problem I observe is waste. Most of the waste garbages are classified like organic products, plastic, paper, glass, etc. It seems nice but when they collected by the workers, all of them are thrown into the same pockets. It means waste is not divided to recycle.

The third ecological problem in the campus is thermal insulating system in student village. Wooden windows are not good enough to insulte. So, much more energy is needed to heat the rooms than very well insulated rooms.

The last problem that  I realize is about transportation. Some of the workers, staffs and academicians  prefers to use public transportations. However, rest of them use private cars. If the fact that the autopark area is almost full during days is considered, the seriousness of the situation can be understood very well.

Burak Öztürk / 120110037