The other day we did an Interview with Nicole Rosow (Violet’s aunt) who works as the director of sustainability at the IE University in Madrid. As part of her job she makes sure that the appropriate departments are doing everything that they can to keep the university’s carbon footprint very low. She also tries to get people excited about sustainability so people will know better and make better choices. At the University they have a lot of communication campaigns like tiktoks to try to inspire young people to waste less food. They have a partnership with the organization “To Good To Go” which works to help kids and staff to be able to get reduced prices on foods that are leftover at the end of the day, because you can’t donate leftover food because of the chain of temperatures. The University is completely powered by renewable energy, so they don’t use any fossil fuels at all around any of the campuses. She not only is trying to make sure that people aren’t wasting energy but she makes sure that everything is easy and accessible, for example composting. One of the things that Nicole does is make sure that when they have events that the amount of food that you’re ordering is adjusted to the number of people coming, so that they are not offering too much food that isn’t going to be eaten in the end. She also tries to incorporate composting into all the campuses. The fertilizer that is made from the composting that they use on some campuses is used to reforest the campus, so they are not only cutting the food waste down but they are also growing trees

Nicole also talked to us about how Europe has a very different approach to sustainability than the US does. Europe has much more regulations on how businesses operate and they try to make business operations more sustainable. They also have more environmental protections in place than the US. Spain is a leader in Europe in renewable energy, she says that if you drive anywhere outside of Madrid you will start to see wind farms or solar panel farms. In Europe the people put a lot more effort into not wasting energy, for example nobody leaves their lights on in any rooms when people aren’t in there, also the escalators in any building or shopping center slow down to almost a complete stop when nobody’s on them. I was inspired to start making even small changes to my daily lives, for example turning off lights more often and it was very interesting to hear about the differences in sustainability in Europe and the US and .