Turning teenagers on to the benefits of being green

A new project aims to convince teenagers of the benefits of being environmentally friendly – by making it cool

Most teenagers want to be considered “cool”. But do they also want to be thought of as green – in the environmental sense of the word, that is? Trying to make greenness equate with cool is the focus of a new three-year research project involving five British universities sharing £1.5m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

The scheme has been christened Teddi, which doesn’t sound particularly cool, but does condense into a handy acronym the stated aims of Transforming Energy Demand through Digital Innovation.

Parents may yet be inadvertent beneficiaries of the scheme – the ones who follow teenage offspring around the house, switching off lights, computers, televisions, mobile chargers and hairdryers, while still receiving electricity bills only slightly lower than the gross national product of Albania.

“Most teenagers are non-bill-paying consumers,” says the project leader, Dr Janet Read, a computer scientist at the University of Central Lancashire. Read ought to know: three of her four children still live at home. (One is 14, one 17 and one 20.)

“Subliminally, that might have given me the idea,” she concedes. “But I’m not over-preoccupied by our domestic electricity bills, to be honest. It was more that this project offered the opportunity to change the way a whole generation think about their energy consumption.”

For more, see:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/14/environment-teenagers-energy-use