Dining by candlelight has become a practice almost exclusively reserved for holidays like Valentine's Day. But on February 6, more than a week ahead of the day celebrating the patron saint of love, students and faculty of St. Paul's School dined by candlelight at Seated Meal - the first of four such occasions scheduled to take place in the name of love…of the environment.

St. Paul's is one of 15 high schools participating in the Green Cup Challenge during the month of February. The Challenge began in 2003 at Phillips Exeter Academy as a campus-wide energy-conservation competition designed to raise awareness about energy consumption. The inter-dorm challenge expanded to include interscholastic competition in 2006 with students at Lawrenceville School and Northfield Mount Hermon joining the energy-saving effort.

According to the Green Cup Web site, "Facilities management at each institution will be responsible for measuring energy consumption through metering of individual buildings. Overall campus electricity use will be measured twice: first, during a quiet metering to get baseline numbers; second, during the actual competition. The two measurements will be compared, and the school that decreases energy consumption the most (measured by percent change) wins. All members of the campus community will be involved, including, staff, faculty, and administration."

Students from the SPS Eco-Action group are leading the Green Cup charge in Millville, helping to educate their peers and the entire School community about the importance of energy conservation.

"We are hoping this year to focus more from a facilities perspective and that in the coming years students will get more involved," said Rhiya Trivedi '08, one of the student Eco-Action heads. "We hope to start having dorm competitions to see which dorm can save the most electricity."

John O'Shaughnessy, the School's maintenance and utilities manager, said Unitil has agreed to read the SPS main meter weekly and submit the results for him to pass along to faculty member Scott Reynolds, the adviser to the Green Cup Challenge and a member of the Environmental Stewardship Committee. On February 9, two weeks into the Green Cup, Reynolds reported that St. Paul's was in 10^th place, but that total electricity usage by all of the GC competing schools had decreased by 76,000 kilowatt-hours (electricity used multiplied by the time you use it) - a cost savings of almost $10,000 and a carbon emissions reduction of 24.5 tons of CO₂.

"The true point of the competition is to raise awareness of our ecological footprint," said Reynolds. "Wasteful use of finite resources is destructive to the environment, unethical in a global perspective, and expensive to each of us."

Trivedi and her Eco-Action co-head Chloe Squires '07 are actively leading the charge to replace the traditional yet energy-inefficient incandescent bulbs (sorry, Thomas Edison) with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) where possible on the grounds. Trivedi has been particularly active in pushing the conservation initiative since reviewing the results of a student-conducted energy audit last December that showed 30 percent of students left at least one light on in their room during Seated Meal. In the worst cases revealed, two houses left more than 60 lights, computers, stereos, fans, and other equipment running while they dined in another building.

During the same December energy audit, Eco-Action members calculated the number of incandescent light bulbs present in student dorm rooms (1,300) and their CO₂ emission. Trivedi and others helped to determine that the School could cut about three quarters of the CO₂ emissions from student lamps by replacing them with compact fluorescents. According to numbers provided by Eco-Action, an incandescent bulb running five hours a day for 210 days - roughly the number of school days in a year - emits 135.1 pounds of CO₂ annually whereas a compact fluorescent yields only 34.5 pounds in that same period. Electricity cost savings are dramatic as well, as incandescent bulbs ring in at $14.18 annually compared to $3.63 per CFL.

"As you can see, it is a huge savings," said Trivedi.

As fate would have it, the cost of replacing rounded incandescent bulbs throughout the grounds with the tornado-shaped CFLs is approximately $3,900, and of that total $2,600 will come from money the School has saved from the tray-free initiative in the dining hall.

Director of Food Services Kurt Ellison announced in Chapel in early January that the School had made nearly $16,000 less in food purchases from the previous year since going trayless on September 12. His estimates also indicate that the School will show a reduction of more than 261,000 gallons of water over the course of the next year.

"The reduction in wasted food has become very clear," Ellison reported. "The savings in milk totaled 685 gallons, or almost 11,000 glasses. We saved over 1,300 gallons of juice, or the equivalent of 21,000 glasses. The savings in cereal amounted to 43 cases or 6,700 bowls, and we have used 8,200 fewer eggs, or a savings of 690 dozen. In addition, the beverage savings for the period totaled over 77,000 glasses. We also have broken 1,000 fewer water glasses than the same period last year."

In another effort to conserve water and decrease the number of recyclable bottles floating around the grounds, Eco-Action teamed with the Student Council and The Pelican student newspaper in a joint effort to institute the use of personal, reusable water bottles and curb the use of disposable water bottles. Eco-Action found that the School was purchasing 2,000 bottles of spring water per week - a number reflected in the 26,000 bottles consumed in the initial 13 weeks of school.

"If you average it, that's about 50 empties for each student here at St. Paul's," said Trivedi. "By the time a Third Former graduates, that number will reach 450. That's a tremendous and avoidable amount of waste created when there's a simple alternative that's available - get a water bottle."

With inspiration from the Green Cup, the trayless effort, the water bottle initiative, and a mandatory viewing of the global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the School is increasing energy awareness among its students. In addition, faculty and staff have been asked to remain vigilant in their energy use during the day, and teachers have been asked to shut off classroom lights and computers when not in use. O'Shaughnessy said other energy conservation measures are on the horizon as well, including the possibility of replacing existing washers and driers in student residences to Energy Star efficient ones. Whatever the initiative, the environmental message is coming through loud and clear.

"After we went trayless in the fall, people thought that was it. We want to cultivate an attitude where things are going to keep on changing, and people need to be wiling to accept these changes," said Trivedi. "Here on campus, we are told that we are the best. I remember thinking that if we are not doing everything, if we can't be conscious of our surroundings, then we are not really the best. I think that to maintain that perspective of ourselves, we have to be doing everything we can. The world is not this 2,000 acres right here. None of us can end global warming, but we can cut a lot of carbon."