Sustainable U

colleges and universities lead the way to a greener tomorrow

The facts are sobering: The world’s oil supply has peaked and the fossil fuel economy, which drove the industrial revolution with a cheap, seemingly endless supply of power, will collapse within the lifetime of today’s college students. With so much at stake, it’s no wonder colleges and universities feel a unique responsibility to experiment, innovate and lead the world into a more sustainable, environmentally friendly future.

Over the past few years, American colleges have embarked on a mission to become more sustainable—that is, to meet the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Campuses have hired administrators, developed programs and made commitments toward elevating sustainability as a priority and goal. Interestingly, though, each college is traveling a different path. Unlike the past two centuries in which fossil fuels have been the clearly dominant source of energy, scientists and scholars believe there will be no “silver bullet” source of energy in the future.

Because of their devotion to research and education, colleges have one advantage over businesses in the private sector. They are much freer to experiment, to discover the things that work and to disseminate the knowledge they gain. Ideally, there are no trade secrets on a college campus. Discoveries are open knowledge to be used for the betterment of society. “We want to be open, public and transparent so people can come and learn here,” says Troy Goodnough, campus sustainability coordinator for the University of Minnesota-Morris. Today, students from schools such as the University of Florida-Gainesville, Syracuse University and Oregon State University are collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy to assist manufacturing companies on being more energy efficient. Campuses such as the U of M-Morris and Bowdoin College in Maine are already giving the world a look at the possible future of localized sources of energy. The U of M-Morris harnesses the wind power across the Midwestern prairie, and Bowdoin College is completely powered by hydroenergy from nearby Lisbon Falls. More schools are cutting down the energy costs of shipping food across the country by buying locally grown. Depending on the season, between 35 to 70 percent of food in the Harvard University dining hall is grown locally -- one of the big reasons it’s considered one of the top sustainable campuses in America.

Schools are also focusing on designating new buildings as “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” (LEED certified), a nationally recognized standard for the construction and operation of environmentally friendly buildings. Worldwide, buildings account for 33 percent of carbon dioxide emissions and 40 percent of energy and material use. But buildings that are able to meet LEED standards are significantly more environmentally friendly than those that are traditionally built. Also, the LEED certification process offers schools a myriad of green options. Designers have the freedom to emphasize certain areas of the building’s construction and design, such as its energy efficiency, water efficiency or the construction materials used.

The U of M’s future football stadium will be the first stadium in the country to be LEED-certified when it opens in August 2009. Its builders are using local rock and recycled steel for construction materials. Brian Swanson, stadium project coordinator, says part of the stadium may be carbon-neutral. Another college focusing on getting its buildings LEED-certified is Grinnell College in Iowa. Grinnell recently received LEED certification for its environmental research facility that is heated by geothermal energy and includes a water filtration system that reuses collected rainwater for the building’s greenhouse.

Campuses are finding out that going green allows them seemingly endless opportunities to solve old problems in new and creative ways. One school doing particularly well in pushing against the barriers of conventional wisdom is the U of M-Morris. An oasis in the middle of a prairie, the wind turbine at the U of M-Morris towers over the trees and pastures of this small town. It is the environmental centerpiece of the U of M system’s most sustainable campus. From inside its metallic belly, Cory Marquart, an engineer at the university-run West Central Research and Outreach Center that houses the turbine, lists its features, costs and energy output. Since its inception, the turbine has produced more than 14 million kilowatt hours of electricity, enough to power 550 homes each year. More importantly, in its first two years of production, more than 12,322 tons of carbon dioxide, 44 tons of nitrogen oxide and 78 tons of sulfur dioxide weren’t released into the environment because of the clean energy generated by the turbine.

The U of M-Morris is also an example of what a school can accomplish when it decides sustainability is among the most important issues colleges and universities face. Along with building the first large-scale wind research turbine at a U.S. public university, Morris began construction of a new biomass gasification facility that will convert corn stalks and other agricultural residue into a “syngas” that can be used instead of natural gas for heating and cooling. “There is no waste,” Goodnough says. “Just stuff we used to think of as waste.” Morris plans to be completely energy self-sufficient by 2010; part of that process includes a green residence hall and a reverse osmosis water filtration system. “They are doing a superb job switching over to renewable technologies,” says Judy Walton, director of strategic initiatives for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

An average college campus has extensive dining facilities, offices, residential buildings, transportation systems and chemical laboratories. These campuses are essentially small cities and face the same environmental challenges. The U of M-Morris has a distinct advantage of being a small school with about 1,750 students. It should be much harder, it seems, to implement these programs at a campus such as the U of M-Twin Cities, the Ohio State University and the University of Florida-Gainesville, all of which have more than 50,000 students.

Not so, says Walton.

“The real challenge is shifting a campus' institutional culture to make sustainability the lens through which everything else is viewed,” she says. “The most amazing commitment a school can make right now is becoming a signatory to the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. [That] has catalyzed a wide variety of related sustainability activities on campus.”

The American College and Universities Presidents Climate Commitment, an effort of schools around the country to address climate change, was signed by presidents of more than 425 campuses, including Duke University, Oregon State University and the 10 colleges of the University of California system. The effort mandates that within two years of signing, the school must have a deadline in place for becoming carbon-neutral. The school must also make its action plan, inventory and progress reports open to the public.

Ten Minnesota schools have signed the commitment, including Augsburg College, Winona State University and the U of M-Morris—but not the U of M-Twin Cities. “I do wish [President Robert Bruininks] would sign the commitment,” says Tom Fisher, dean of the U of M’s College of Design. “It’s not much more constraining than the Regent’s policy [a nonbinding sustainability policy already in place at the U of M], and it would send a signal to the broader public that these things are important.”

Until recently, there was no system for comparing the sustainability efforts of U.S. colleges and universities. For the last two years, however, the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit organization that researches and measures campus sustainability and sustainable endowment practices, released an annual report that grades the sustainability of 200 of the nation’s largest schools. The report card was created to share information and help“spark discussions of sustainability,” says Mark Orlowski, founder and executive director. “There was a lot of information, but it was very scattered. There was no easy, simple way for someone to find out how sustainable or proactive a school is in these areas.”

The annual report grades schools on eight different, equally weighted categories of sustainability. In the most recent report, released in October 2007, only six schools received an overall grade of an A-minus. Those schools were Dartmouth College, Harvard, University of Washington, Middlebury College, Carleton College and University of Vermont. No schools received an A. Orlowski notes that the top schools have made a commitment to sustainability and have dedicated staff and structures in place. But, he says, “They’re A-minus schools, not A-plus schools. So they all still have a ways to go. If they sat back, relaxed and did nothing, in five years they would be at best a B school because the change of pace is so rapid. Everyone needs to keep moving forward.”

In the annual report, the U of M earned a B and placed within the top 31 percent of the 200 schools. The U of M’s recycling and composting programs combined with the fact that it serves about 18 percent locally grown food, earned it an A in the food and recycling category. The U of M also earned an A in transportation due to its extensive fleet of hybrid cars and its U-Pass and Zipcar programs. The U of M’s lowest grade, a C, was given to its administration and endowment transparency. Although the U of M has a sustainability policy and hired a sustainability coordinator, it does not have the extensive sustainability program that other schools have. “The university has done substantial things but has lagged behind in terms of making [sustainability] a priority,” says Virajita Singh, senior research fellow at the U of M’s Center for Sustainable Building Research.

Near Rosemount, the U of M is in the final planning stages of a highly experimental project: a futuristic, environmentally conscious model community called UMore Park. Greg Cuomo, director of operations for UMore Park, says the U of M hopes the park will be energy self-sufficient. After mining the land for its aggregate gravel, the developers plan to reshape the topography to better handle water flow and to install tubes for geothermal heating. The southern portion of UMore Park will remain a pristine wilderness, never to be developed and easily accessible to the new community. “We want it to be a model. We want people to look to UMore Park on how to use local energy, maximize green space and effectively manage water runoff,” Cuomo says. “We have an ability to put together an all-star team, some of the brightest minds. That’s an advantage that we have as a university. We can afford to think about these things and move forward thoughtfully.”

Perhaps, though, the most important catalyst for a college to become more sustainable is not vague policies from a distant administration; it is the activism and passion of an energetic student body. In the end it’s the students who can move administrators to act. In the spirit of the student organized sit-ins and freedom rides of the 1960s that helped spark the civil rights movement, students today are in a profound position to bring about change. The Campus Climate Challenge, an organization comprised of more than 30 student groups from the U.S and Canada, lobbies for carbon-free campuses. Recyclemania, which Walton calls “very successful,” is a competition between college campuses to collect the most recyclables and least trash per capita. On Nov. 2, 2007, an estimated 5,500 students and young adults converged in Washington, D.C., for Power Shift 2007 to bring awareness to elected leaders and presidential candidates about the need to act against climate change.

In order to raise awareness at the U of M, graduate student Sarah Wolbert collected and displayed three days’ worth of waste from the College of Design. At the end of the three days, almost two tons of garbage sat in the college’s rotunda with a Mission Accomplished- style banner prominently displayed overhead. Wolbert carries no illusions that she immediately changed the habits of every student who saw the garbage. But problems are harder to ignore when they’re staring right at you. “It seems like these ways of living will [only] really take when started in a grassroots fashion,” Wolbert says.

While students can act as the spark that turns ideas into reality, colleges are a big force that can make those changes possible. And in a symbiotic way, being immersed in a sustainable environment can cause a student to view the world in a different, more conscious manner. Schools can have a tremendous effect on the world by taking the idea of sustainability and moving it outside the abstractions and theory of the classroom. They can turn campuses into places where, every day, students can see a greener future right before their eyes. a

Daniel Schmidt