“Flip the Switch”: Stud­i­er­enden­werke launch energy-saving campaign in their student halls of residence

• Aim: To mobilise student resid­ents in the halls of resid­ence to save energy.
• Campaign: energy saving tips, social media chal­lenge, posters, flyers, website: www.myenergychallange.de
• DSW Secretary General Matthias Anbuhl: “To save energy, we all have to flip the switch”.

 

Berlin, 1 September 2022. “Flip the Switch”, flip the switch, in the student dorm­itory and in the mind: the 57 Stud­i­er­enden­werke organ­ised in the Deutsches Studen­ten­werk (DSW) are launching an energy-saving campaign today for the approx­im­ately 300,000 students living in the student unions’ dormitories.

In view of the energy crisis and the drastic increase in energy prices in Germany, many students are facing a finan­cial crisis this autumn. The galloping prices hit this low-income group partic­u­larly hard.

“We want to motivate them to actively save energy. We are thinking espe­cially of the resid­ents of halls of resid­ence, because this is where the greatest savings poten­tial lies through the students them­selves,” explains Matthias Anbuhl, Secretary General of the DSW. “We hope for a change in aware­ness and beha­viour, i.e. to be able to flip the switch in our heads to get through the crisis well together.”

Detlef Rujanski, Managing Director of Stud­i­er­enden­werk Siegen, says: “We are facing great chal­lenges. One of our tasks is to provide students with afford­able living space. However, the resid­ents of our halls of resid­ence must now also actively cooperate in saving energy. Through their beha­viour, they them­selves have a consid­er­able influ­ence on their incid­ental rental costs. Everyone must become aware of this.”

The core aspect of the inter­active campaign part will be a social media chal­lenge. Under the hashtag #myen­er­gchal­lenge, students can chal­lenge each other to energy-saving chal­lenges, docu­ment them and also post them on social media. This could be, for example, a chal­lenge to take a cold shower, to perman­ently turn down the room temper­ature or to refrain from blow-drying your hair.

In addi­tion, there are short inform­a­tion brochures, stickers, poster templates, flyer towers for the inform­a­tion brochures, floor stickers, roll-ups, beach flags or info screens as well as the inform­ative website www.myenergychallenge.de, which is avail­able in several languages.