MARYVILLE, Mo. – Northwest Missouri State University announced Tuesday it has been ranked among the top 10 universities in the nation in the results of the 2015 Campus Conservation Nationals for its efforts in energy reduction.

This makes the second time in three years that the University has earned the distinction.

“Campus Conservation Nationals shows how college students are pioneering efforts to create a more sustainable future, starting with their campuses,” said Hannah Debelius, the students program lead at the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council, which partners with Lucid, the Alliance to Save Energy and the National Wildlife Federation to organize the contest. “These students demonstrate the importance of making small daily changes to save energy and water. The results are remarkable, and every student and institution that participated should be proud of this accomplishment.”

Northwest saved 65,706 kilowatt-hours, averted 123,593 pounds of carbon dioxide and saved $3,942 during the four-week competition. That is the equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions from nine passenger vehicles, CO2 emissions from 5,089 gallons of gasoline and CO2 emissions from electricity use in four homes for a year. The totals are based on the energy-savings of Northwest residence halls Hudson-Perrin, Dieterich, Franken, Millikan, South Complex, Roberta and Tower Suites.

In conjunction with Campus Conservation Nationals, Northwest residence halls also competed in a campus-sponsored contest, “Flip the Switch Reduce Your Pawprint,” to win funding toward new equipment for their buildings. That contest resulted in savings of $3,942 and 65,706 kilowatt-hours of electricity with a greenhouse gas avoidance equal to burning 48,866 pounds of coal. Hudson-Perrin, the reigning champion for the past three years, won the campus competition by reducing its energy usage by 31 percent.

 

The 2015 Campus Conservation Nationals competition involved 125 colleges and universities and saved the schools more than $290,000 in electricity and water while reducing greenhouse gas emissions equal to taking 182 homes off the grid for a year. During five years of the competition, participants have saved 6 million kilowatt hours of electricity, equivalent to averting more than 9 million pounds of CO2 from the atmosphere.