This is the time of year where universities are bombarded with high school juniors and seniors looking into the universities they want to apply to or have already been accepted to. Parents and students alike come prepared with tons of questions to ask campus representatives. One question that previous representatives haven’t had to prepare was the sustainability question: Is your campus a green campus?

Traveling by bike is one of the healthiest ways to get around a campus. Many universities that pride themselves on being a green campus promote the use of bikes. Not only do they help decrease emissions of cars or buses, but they help with the personal health of the rider. Nokia has come up with another incentive to bike around campus. While biking, charge your phone!

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With the added sense of environmental awareness, The Princeton Review, a program dedicated to helping students succeed by giving them information on tests, college prep and college statistics, has added a list to the countless amounts of information they have on colleges; The Princeton Review’s Guide to 286 Green Colleges.

The Princeton Review took surveys of parents, students and college employees and found out in 2009 having an eco friendly campus and living an eco-lifestyle was important to 66% of high school-age college applicants. Students today feel the urge to learn more about environmental issues and to make their college a green campus.  Rachel Gutter, director for the Center for Green Schools at the Green Building Council said students realize the environmental problems they are inheriting and feel empowered to make a change.

Universities around the country are doing everything they can to become a green campus. From the ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ campaign to using naturally fueled buses, being an eco friendly campus is not only the “in” thing, but the smart thing.

There are plenty of things that universities have been doing, but there are also items that individual students can do to make a green campus thrive and support having an eco-lifestyle. Here are 10 environmentally friendly ideas for dorm rooms, apartments and campus life in general to make your campus a more eco friendly campus.

Even though you may think that the desert is no place for anything green, the students at California’s College of the Desert located in Palm Desert are determined to prove you wrong.

Working with the Riverside County Economic Development Agency, an organization aimed to enhance the economic growth of the surrounding county, and using $2 million in economic stimulus funds, the college will train students in several projects for renewable energy. These projects will focus on wind energy and solar energy.

This past September the University of Denver started a new on-campus bike sharing program that was created by the school’s sustainability committee. This new program allows current DU students, faculty and staff to rent high-tech bikes for free from a special bike-lending library…all with the swipe of their DU identification card.

The bike share program offered at the University of Denver is part of a citywide bike sharing program that is set to launch in April of 2010. By then, the city of Denver hopes to have 600 bikes offered at 50 solar powered kiosks around the city.

Middlebury College, which we have mentioned in previous 2008 Sustainability Report Card and Sierra Club’s Cool Schools posts, is considered to be one of the greenest colleges in our country. After switching a few years ago to burning wood chips in addition to oil to heat the campus, the college is now going for a cheaper and more eco-friendly alternative green energy fuel resource: willow shrubs.

The college currently buys 20,000 wood chips a year from local loggers to heat half of the campus, and the other half is heated by oil. By switching to willow shrubs as an alternative fuel source the school will save over $1.5 million a year in oil costs.

As the world continues to face environmental and sustainability issues head-on, more college students are becoming interested in what they can do to be a part of the green future, and a large portion of these students are in New Jersey.

While these students follow sustainable practices on their own, like recycling, conserving energy and reducing their carbon footprint, they are also starting to incorporate these practices with what they learn from green classes that focus on science, technology and politics.

For the past 3 years the Sierra Club, one of the largest environmental organizations in the world, has put together a “Cool Schools” list of the top eco-friendly universities in America, and it has been published in the organization’s Sierra magazine.  These schools represent the best in green energy efficiency, waste management and food operations.

In an effort to inspire incoming freshmen students to go green, the University of Virginia Bookstore and Housing Division have filled demonstration green dorm rooms full of eco-friendly products.

These green dorm rooms, which have everything from Seventh Generation trash bags and paper towels to green energy efficient microwaves, will be an alternative to traditional dorm rooms, which usually ignore sustainability efforts.