Open Access

Maike Sippel, Daniel Meyer, Niklas Scholliers

• Increasingly, universities are taking responsibility for climate protection. While there has been a growth of activities and studies on greening campus operations and curricula, student lifestyles may also be interesting to look at. This study focuses on student carbon emissions from consumption at the University of Applied Science in Konstanz, Germany. The study includes almost 10% of the university's students. Data on student lifestyle and emission patterns was collected via questionnaires and calculated with a web-based carbon calculator. The study analyzes personal carbon emissions and influencing factors from four consumption categories; housing (including heating and electricity), mobility (including private car use, public transport and aviation), food and other consumption. The findings show average students’ carbon footprint to be 10.9 t CO2 equivalent per year and of the same order of magnitude as the German average. While students cause less emission through heating because of smaller living space per person, they cause considerably more emission by aviation. A relatively small group of frequent flyers dominates aviation emissions. The study shows that the correlation between low income/expenditure and low carbon emissions is not valid for students due to high long-distance mobility.