Beyond the Clothes Swap: Rethinking Campus Sustainability

Photo: Stig Larssæther/NTNU

Katrina Hjermann
Green Office, NTNU

If you walk onto a university campus today you’ll hear the same buzzwords bouncing off the walls: circular economy, degrowth, and sustainability. We host clothes swaps, print pamphlets and hand out tote bags. These initiatives are positive, but they raise a crucial question: are well-meaning individual actions enough or do we need to look deeper at the structures behind our habits?

That is where the Green Office at NTNU comes in. The Green Office is a meeting place for students and staff who want to make studying and working at NTNU more sustainable. Run by engaged student assistants in collaboration with university staff, it creates opportunities to turn ideas into action.

What does the Green Office do?

• A meeting place for ideas: Provides a shared space where students and staff can exchange ideas, discuss environmental challenges and develop new sustainability initiatives.
• Activities and projects: Organizes seminars, clothing swaps, debates and workshops that encourage dialogue and action towards a greener campus.
• Funding for sustainability initiatives: Offers students and staff the opportunity to apply for funding to turn their own sustainability ideas into concrete projects.
• Collaboration for change: Connects students and university staff to bridge the gap between individual engagement and institutional change.

As part of an international network of Green Offices across Europe, we work to connect students, researchers and university leadership. By bridging these groups, we aim to turn campuses into living laboratories for real-world change, because genuine sustainability requires looking far beyond quick fixes.

The Hairdryer Paradox: Testing the Limits of Sharing

In autumn 2025, the Green Office teamed up with SIT (Student Welfare Organisation in Trondheim) on a project: redefine sharing culture on campus. We took a student housing block, treated it as a living laboratory, and asked one simple, practical question:

Does a building with 120 students really need 120 hairdryers?

We mapped out sharing dynamics. What are people willing to share with flatmates? With neighbors? With the whole campus? We pushed out surveys, launched app developments, hosted clothing swaps, organized holiday exchange markets, and ran student-led workshops.

The response? The same question kept echoing back at us:

“Can’t I just pay for my own?”

How do you build a genuine sharing economy in a society where money is the ultimate measure of convenience and value?

Students are constantly praised as progressive trailblazers: open-minded, flexible and ready for new ways of living. But even in this demographic, transaction-based thinking runs deep. Shifting the definition of "value" away from bank accounts and ownership turns out to be much harder than handing out free stuff.

From Clothes Racks to Paradigm Shifts

This realization forced us to pull back and look at the bigger picture. A clothing rack or a shared appliance room is a fine start, but degrowth and circular thinking aren't just about sharing tools, they require a fundamental mindshift.

And that mindshift can't happen in isolation. It has to happen everywhere at once:

• In lecture halls and professor discussions
• In curriculum development and syllabus revisions
• In political corridors and boardrooms
• Across disciplinary silos that keep us working in bubbles

We are in the middle of a transition. Superficial hacks belong to the past and integrated, structural thinking is what's needed now.

Rooted in the Sustainable Development Goals

This experiment hits at the heart of SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production. Reducing consumption isn't solved by adding an app to an already consumerist mindset; it requires redesigning our social norms and overcoming our dependency on individual ownership.

Furthermore, breaking through these cultural walls directly serves SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals. Real sustainability doesn't happen when students work in one corner, researchers in another and university administrators in a third. It demands cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary collaboration across every layer of power.

The Green Office is a space to gather, debate, disagree and dismantle the assumptions we didn't even realize we had. It’s the platform where student energy meets institutional capability, so we can educate a generation capable of driving meaningful environmental change.

We don't just need surface-level agreement. We need bold dialogue, system-level change and a culture that chooses collective well-being over personal ownership.

Want to get involved?

Visit the Green Office website at NTNU to learn more about our work and explore opportunities to contribute your own ideas.