What’s better than the UvA turning down their heating for a day to save 2600kg of CO2?
The UvA turning down their heat for a week to save over 13,000kg in CO2!
As the Warm Sweater Day initiative organized by Klimaatverbond Nederland has gained increasing momentum in recent years, the UvA has decided to go one step further in 2020 by turning down the heat for not just a day, but an entire week.
Never heard of Warm Sweater Day? Welcome to one of the Netherlands’ biggest unified annual climate actions: grab your woolly jumper and join in!
Warm Sweater Day is a day around the nation when businesses, organizations, and schools alike come together in turning down their heating for a day to raise awareness about how we can stay warm over winter with more layers and less energy - warming yourself rather than warming the planet. All UvA campuses will be dialing down the thermostat from Monday 3 to Friday 7 February from around 21 - 23 degrees to just 20 degrees Celsius. If everyone simply wears an extra layer rather than sitting in a very warm building, we save six percent energy and CO2 for each degree that the thermostat is turned down.
On the recent decision to extend the Warm Sweater Day to a whole week, the UvA says “The whole point of Warm Sweater Day is for us to make as many of our staff and students as possible aware of the way we heat our buildings and homes and the effect this has on the climate. By extending the campaign to a week, we are hoping to reach more of our staff and students and to inspire them to follow our example”.
Regarding any future action inspired by Warm Sweater Week, the UvA recently wrote in their newsletter that they have hope for what this tradition could inspire for permanent campus policy, stating that “if the UvA (as a small city encompassing in excess of 30,000 students and 6,000 staff) were to turn down the heating by one degree over the course of a whole year, then the energy savings would be enough to heat approximately 1,400 homes and CO2 emissions would be reduced by 3,293 tonnes. This saving is many times greater and more significant than the saving we will be achieved by turning down the thermostat a couple of degrees in UvA buildings for a week”.
The UvA hopes that by extending such an initiative and raising more awareness among students and staff, “maybe we will eventually be able to permanently reduce the temperature in our buildings by a couple of degrees”.
We’re proud to get behind our university in this week-long initiative and we hope to see you all around campus next week staying warm in cozy sweaters!
Help us promote the idea of extra layers over extra heating by tagging us in your social media posts about Warm Sweater Day! We would love to hear from you on Instagram @uvagreenoffice and Facebook UvA Green Office.