"Green Berkeley" campaign passes Proposition H 87% to 13%

Proposition H passed resoundingly 87% to 13%

The Green Berkeley campaign ran this Prop on the
spring ballot during ASUC elections this year and it
changes the ASUC (student government) constitution by adding the adoption of environmental sustainability as an ASUC policy.

Specifically it mandates that all paper purchased be
of 30% post-consumer-content and it requires
environmental preferable product purchasing of any
items over $200. (Ex: an energy star copy machine will
be purchased over a regular one if the price
difference is within 10%.)

And when the Recycling and Refuse Manager at UC Davis found out she responded to all the UC campus managers "I have the resolution that our students passed and now with UCB's we could push for it at the UC level."

I thought that was pretty exciting.

And we met with Vice Chancellor Ron Coley yesterday
(he met with us for 2 1/2 hours!!!!!!!!) and we talked
with him about all the information we have gathered
this semester from departments about how to make the purchasing of 30% pcc recycled paper a university-wide policy and we talked with him about how much support there is from the students.

He was extremely supportive and impressed with the
work we had done and is going to meet with the head of Campus Supply to discuss the feasability of purchasing better and more recycled paper and making it more readily available to the departments and of making recycled paper the default paper when departments order it.

He also advised us to submit a proposal to Chancellor
Berdahl with everything we had presented to him,
asking Berdahl to make the purchasing of 30% pcc paper a university policy, and that once we did that he
would speak with the Chancellor about his support for
it and if the Chancellor supports the proposal then he
(Coley) will help figure out how to really make it
happen. (He called it the "Pincher approach" with the
Chancellor --- students coming in from one side and
him coming in from the other)

So we will be submitting our proposal to Chancellor
Berdahl by the end of this week.

So things are going well at Berkeley.
---Heidi