How Commerce and Engineering Student Simone Made Her Uni Campus More Sustainable

"There was a clear need to give students platforms to enact sustainability on campus."

This post is presented in partnership with Monash Business School.

When you begin your university journey, it is safe to say you are mainly focused on furthering your knowledge, making new friends and ensuring you have the skills to kickstart your career.

While these are undoubtedly important parts of the uni experience, there are a whole lot of other opportunities uni gives you that you may have never even considered, like starting your own social impact venture.

As Monash Business School’s Environmental Engineering and Commerce student Simone Pianko tells Student Edge, she never expected that she’d start the BorrowCup initiative while completing her undergraduate double degree.

"Did I enter uni wanting to start a social impact project? Maybe not," she says.

"I didn’t come in with the attitude that I wanted to be a sustainability change agent. But Environmental Engineering was a great catalyst for my learning."

BorrowCup offers an alternative to disposable coffee cups on campus, enabling people to borrow a reusable cup rather than wasting a disposable one.

"You ask for a BorrowCup at a café, you return the cup to one of the 50 return points on campus, and then we pick up the cups, clean them and return them to the café," Simone explains.

"We’re now at nine cafés, and we had 1,400 users per week in 2019, and we have a 95 per cent return rate."

Simone, who is one of two students to win Monash Business School’s 2020 Future Global Leaders Award, became exposed to the problems associated with disposable coffee cups while undertaking Monash's Green Steps program. 

The program aims to equip students with the skills, tools and knowledge needed to become effective leaders and sustainability change agents.

"As part of [the program], you need to commit to doing one action yourself, and I said I was going to ditch disposable coffee cups," she says.

"That educational experience for me of actually changing my own behaviour was very powerful."

Considering how damaging disposable coffee cups are to the environment, Simone and a team of students began brainstorming ways to prevent people from simply chucking out their disposable coffee cups. Eventually, they landed on the idea of BorrowCup.

"We launched at Wholefoods, which is the student run café on campus, and they were super supportive, and we worked on it together," she says.

"It was a 10-day pilot, and we had a 70 per cent return rate, which wasn’t enough. It was enough to tell us that if we worked on our solution and made it better, then we could increase that.

"But what was exciting was that students wanted to be involved and there was a clear need to give students platforms to enact sustainability on campus."

While Simone is highly passionate about sustainability now, she points out that it wasn’t something she had always been interested in. However, she became fascinated by it when she started studying Environmental Engineering. 

"I kind of fell into Environmental Engineering and it was really in my first year courses that I got exposed to what it would mean to solve really challenging environmental and social problems, and how important that is," she says.

Simone believes that practicing sustainability in your own life is all about starting small and rewarding yourself.

"Every action counts. You don’t have to do everything at once," she says.

"Just pick one thing, like reducing your meat intake one day a week, or pick one day you’re going to cycle or walk to uni instead of drive."

Simone highlights that studying at Monash Business School has given her access to a range of different resources that have helped her think about the world differently.

"Just by being a student in the business school, the resources are available for you, but if you don’t go and make the effort you’re not going to seize the extra opportunity," she says.

"While the course content is important, what’s more important is the people you meet in the course and the conversations you get to have.

"Those conversations are a gateway to how the uni can enable you to start projects like BorrowCup.”

Now, not even the coronavirus pandemic can stop Simone from thinking about sustainability. Though the move to remote learning may temporarily hinder her social impact venture, she's already innovating her next great solution.

"In the face of this pandemic and the very disrupted world order, my team is talking about the fact that with crisis comes opportunity," she says.

"So, how do we get young people to use all the resources we have to make the recovery more sustainable?

"While we're in the virtual world, a lot of the resources that are available to you in the physical world, you still have access to." 

Want a uni degree that will help you make a difference. Find out more about Monash Business School's wide range of single and double degrees, and learn how their graduates are leading change and making a difference.

Header Image: Supplied