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That's no hoax! As of 2020, American corporations have spent over $120 billion on printing forms. That’s a lot of revenue and paper wasted, which could have contributed to their bottom lines. With sustainability at the forefront of business excellence, these companies and communities are switching to eco-friendly practices.
However, large housing communities like university hostels that house thousands of students still function solely on paper-based operations. The colossal amount of paper waste from filled-out forms, registers, approval copies, and food waste on campus restricts institutions' journey toward sustainability. Furthermore, these wastes also increase the carbon footprint within a university campus.
We live in times when sustainability is no longer a buzzword but rather the need of the hour to tackle the detrimental effects of climate change. We must adopt sustainable practices in all aspects of our lives to tackle these effects. What’s a better place to begin than housing and residential communities? One such community that houses thousands of students across campuses is university hostels.
Sustainable practices are not only crucial in addressing the soaring student housing needs but are equally vital in mitigating environmental challenges.
As students consciously shift their preferences to sustainable housing, this surge creates an unprecedented demand for qualitative accommodation on university campuses.
According to a Global Sustainable Tourism Council report, the carbon dioxide equivalent of direct and indirect emissions per hostel bed averages 0.30 tCO₂e in a 2-year survey period. Amplifying this carbon footprint on the scale of universities worldwide produces a staggering number worth pondering over from an environmental impact perspective.
With more students prioritizing environmental responsibility, value-for-money prospects, health, and mental well-being, the university administrators have their tasks cut out to offer good quality, sustainable hostels. On the other hand, management faces overwhelming challenges like improving the quality of learning, regulatory compliance, organizing operations, and enhancing their bottom line.
A hostel management system is a viable and effective answer to the questions and requirements that sustainable housing solutions raise. These cutting-edge, all-digital solutions can offer a new lease of life to traditional, unorganized, decentralized, and rigorous hostel management operations. Let’s explore some essential ways hostel administrators can transform operations while meeting sustainability goals.
Did you know that university campuses generate over 250,0001 tonnes of waste annually, of which about 10%2 is paper waste? This waste is a result of excessive printing, photocopying, and paper mail that students and staff equally contribute to.
Conventional hostel administration processes are paper-based and need office supplies like registers, notepads, memos, slips, etc. When scaled to multiple hostel premises, thousands of students on campus, redundant processes, and several stakeholders, the number of papers stacked on each other could be nothing short of enormous garbage dumps. Getting rid of these papers typically involves transportation, segregation, and sometimes incineration at garbage landfills.
These disposal modes can increase universities' carbon footprint in greater proportions. A paperless mode of conducting workflows via software and digital platforms has the potential to effectively take the paper count to zero. Furthermore, it can help students get approvals concerning hostel stays faster, and hostel staff attend to all the students’ requests on a single platform. The results are seamless administrative operations, faster approval cycles, and paperless workflows.
1 Source: https://www.hills-waste.co.uk/sectors/education/university-waste-management
2 Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652622026142
The primary reasons behind food waste in hostel messes and cafeterias are over-production, over-ordering, storage inadequacies, and poor food handling. The result is several quintals of surplus food per cafeteria that must be disposed of at the nearest waste treatment center.
Digitalizing messes and cafeterias by adopting sustainable solutions like a hostel management system can effectively tackle these operational inefficiencies. Switching to a digital platform can help streamline meal ordering through options like meal pre-booking, dynamic menu selection, and obtaining real-time food consumption statuses. These upgrades can assist mess staff in improving functionality and productivity and convert food waste into cost savings.
Imagine the following scenario: a hostel mess or cafeteria premise where no truckloads of food get loaded and prepared for disposal in the nearest waste treatment center. This scenario is the outcome when hostels digitalize their messes and cafeterias digital cafeteria by adopting sustainable solutions like hostel management systems.
These systems can help administrators follow greener practices in automating operations like maintaining mess member records, attending to meal orders, and updating the real-time status of meals and dynamic menus. Upgrades like these can help kitchen staff better organize mess or cafeteria operations while saving substantial food preparation costs.
Utilizing a piece of equipment till its end of life is rewarding in terms of financial benefits and is a marker of sustainability in the long run. However, priming equipment to lengthen their lives depends on how well they are optimized for performance and maintenance. A good step to ensuring these optimizations is proactively attending to logged hostel maintenance requests. When logged over a consolidated online platform, these requests can give a comprehensive view of all pending maintenance needs and allow the scope for timely completion. It also helps universities reach one step closer to their sustainability objectives.
Extending sustainability practices into maintenance can prolong the operational life of equipment. Hostels house thousands of students relying on properly functioning plumbing fixtures, electrical fittings, and electronic components. Setting up a consolidated online portal can help students log maintenance requests that hostel staff can attend to proactively, which is an ideal step to prolonging equipment's operational life. This addition can boost greener practices by reducing electronic waste on university campuses and improving the operational life of equipment.
Gone are the days when only companies and organizations leveraged the power of AI, ML, and data analytics to improve business processes. A hostel management system offers universities the flexibility to utilize organizational data and turn it into actionable insights. Authorities can then use these insights to generate detailed reports, monitor trends, manage inventory, and make informed, data-driven decisions. Harnessing the power of data to streamline operations can be a huge boost to make operations and workflows greener and more efficient.
Large organizations like universities generate massive amounts of data, such as student records, hostel occupancy statuses, room allocation patterns, mess operations, food consumption, inventory, etc. This information remains unorganized, decentralized, and unutilized. Collating, centralizing, and monitoring this data via AI, ML, and data analytics technologies can help administrators gain valuable insights into their operations. These insights can help them make informed decisions and take action on the observable trends to align their business practices, keeping sustainability goals at heart.
This innovative software solution is not only a step towards qualitative student housing, but also a driver to making campus stays more sustainable. It can help bridge the gap between helping the planet thrive and providing a conducive learning and residential environment. Sustainable housing ecosystems are a win-win scenario with multiple stakeholders, including students, administrators, and, of course, the planet, and these systems promote this long collaborative process.
With sustainability practices at heart, SpaceBasic’s hostel management system has offered meaningful value additions and performance improvements to the chaotic student housing environment. Our strong stance on switching to greener practices has helped us enable our partner universities to lower their maintenance request resolution time and food waste on campus by up to 50%.
So, delivering a sustainable living environment to students and improving your university's operational efficiency is now easier than ever before. Begin your transformation to sustainable housing solutions by scheduling a demo.
