By: Macy Kramer

Fort Collins, Colo. — In Fort Collins, CO resides Colorado State University, one of the most sustainable and environmentally friendly colleges in America. 

CSU focuses on environmental sustainability, they have programs for food waste prevention and have solar panels to power most on-campus buildings. They have recycling initiatives and donation events. 

CSU does all of this not just to better the environment, but to diminish the amount of over-consumerism occurring on campus and in the city of Fort Collins. 

The importance of over-consumerism is explained extensively in “The Story of Stuff” by Annie Leonard, where she goes through the difference between consumption vs overconsumption, and the personal vs global effects.

Another great read is “Consumerism” by Anne Meleny. The article investigates how consumerism is a part of every person’s daily life and how it affects things like social class.

CSU has done many things to decrease its consumerism and bring awareness to the effects it has on the environment and its students. One initiative written about in, The Collegian, a CSU newspaper, is a group of CSU professors who hosted a panel in Sept. 2022. 

The event was called, “Managing the Planet: Over Consumption What Can We Do?” and collected some professors and students to talk about what is happening and what we can do to help. The panel-style discussion allowed onlookers to propose ideas and questions, and share their methods of reducing their environmental footprint and contribution to overconsumption.

One more notable example was how the clothing brand Patagonia allows its customers to send the clothing back to them to be repaired instead of the clothing being thrown away and put to waste. 

There are plenty of ways for people to reduce their effect on the environment by cutting their overconsumption and helping the planet. CSU is a fantastic provider of better ways to live and has less of a footprint.