GreenSage E-zine 08/2008

Going Green Registers with Colleges
Courtesy Erica R. Hendry, USA TODAY and Tracy Jan, The Boston Globe

Students arriving on campus this month are seeing green — and not just from the money they're spending on tuition.

For example, students coming to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., will start their school year with the university's first "Green Move-In."

Rose Dunnegan, the university's property manager, says the program follows the success of last semester's "Green Move-Out." Student and staff volunteers recycled thousands of pounds of clothing, household items, food and "e-cycling" materials, including cellphones, batteries and computer parts, Dunnegan says.

The Green Move-In includes:
•An online check-in system as an alternative to the paper forms usually distributed to students who move into the dorm rooms.
• Laminated posters with maps and campus information posted in residence halls instead of being distributed on paper.
• The university's bookstore offering reusable grocery bags and clothing made from recycled and organic materials.
• Students encouraged to pack items in reusable containers.
• Designated recycling areas for moving boxes.

Change in San Diego
Freshmen at the University of California-San Diego's Sixth College will move into renovated dorms that are equipped with solar thermal heating, and new carpet and furniture made from recycled material, says Mark Cunningham, the school's executive director of housing, dining and hospitality.

The student residences also will have low-flow shower heads and energy-efficient lighting.

The university will give each on-campus apartment a bucket of eco-friendly cleaning supplies. If that project is successful, Cunningham says, the university will consider giving a year's supply of the products to all apartments.

Cunningham says the efforts supplement existing university programs such as the student-run composting pile and the lab for processing dining-hall oil. Students also built weather-monitoring stations to help the university be more energy-efficient and to use irrigation water more effectively.

"We're trying to teach habits and encourage lifestyles that will allow these students to become the next sustainable consumers of the world," Cunningham says.

Says Casey Pierzchala, a GWU graduate who now works on campus as an environmental sustainability project assistant: "It's definitely a trend right now. … People are becoming more sure of how they impact the environment. The changes that are predicted are in our lifetimes, not our parents', so it's become a little bit more real for us."

A Green George Washington townhouse
Thirty George Washington students will pilot the university's green townhouse. Last year, four students from GreenGW, a student organization devoted to environmental sustainability, lived in a smaller townhouse dedicated to green living. The experiment was so successful that the university moved it to a brick, three-story walk-up this year.

The townhouse is one of the university's living and learning programs, which convert traditional residence halls into themed-based houses that meet specific student academic and lifestyle interests. Residents will have open houses for students who are interested.

Ivey Wohlfeld, a senior and president of GreenGW, says some of the house's features — posted reminders to turn off lights, water monitors and solar panels — could function anywhere, but what makes this project effective is the residents' commitment to holding one another responsible for how they live.

"There's a need and a want for this kind of lifestyle in the community … but there are also many people who aren't quite sure what to do about it," she says. "We're still in that stage, but this is a step in the right direction. It's making 'green' more important in other people's lives."

Jim Schrote, George Washington's director of facilities management, says, "It's really about creating a culture — and that's a return on the investment worth more than any time or money."

Colleges across the country are rolling out a host of environmentally friendly initiatives, expanding beyond campus recycling and energy efficient buildings to hire sustainability officers to oversee all environmental programs. The push coincides with the rise of "green college" rankings and as the schools use their new policies and practices as a recruiting tool for students who came of age during the release of "An Inconvenient Truth," former vice president Al Gore's popular documentary about global warming.

"The current generation of students wants to go to schools that take their environmental responsibility seriously," said Julian Dautremont-Smith, associate director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, based in Lexington, Ky. "In the last two or three years, it's really picked up, past some sort of tipping point."

New England Colleges Commitments
Harvard pledged this month to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2016. The University of New Hampshire became the first school in the nation this year to use landfill methane gas as its prime energy source. And the College of the Atlantic in Maine plans to open green dormitories with composting toilets in August.

The rising fervor around environmental initiatives has launched Harvard, UNH, and the College of the Atlantic into the ranks of the nation's top green colleges, a new category in Princeton Review's "Best 368 Colleges."

The three colleges are among the 11 that received a top rating, a list that includes two other New England schools: Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, which started a Zipcar program and a bicycle co-op last year; and Yale University, which generates 50 percent of the power for a divinity school dormitory from solar panels and plans to add solar technology to other buildings next school year.

More than ever, prospective students are judging colleges on their environmental stewardship, along with the traditional rankings of academics, dorm food, and the party scene, said Rob Franek, vice president of Princeton Review and the annual book's author.

In the Review's latest survey, 63 percent of college applicants and their parents said they wanted more information about a college's commitment to the environment; a quarter of them said it would strongly impact their decision to apply or attend a school.

"Students are exposed to sustainability initiatives at a younger age, so they expect the same from their undergraduate schools, and colleges feel obliged to make them available," Franek said.

Colleges are eyeing each other's initiatives, as the green movement, once confined to the edges of campus life where students living in co-ops would grow vegetables and compost waste, goes mainstream and the schools scramble to outdo one another.

Harvard, with 24 full-time staff members carrying out its Green Campus Initiative, supports the largest university organization in the world devoted to sustainability work, said Leith Sharp, the program's director.

Harvard pays its students to promote conservation efforts and holds an annual competition to honor the most Earth-friendly residence hall for recycling and reducing energy and water consumption. The winning dorm takes home the Green Cup, a trophy fashioned out of an old beer keg spray-painted forest green.

The conservation efforts - which include using the cold water setting when doing laundry, taking only what students think they will eat in the dining hall, and shutting windows in the winter - are paying off, saving the university at least $400,000 a year, Sharp said. Electricity use in undergraduate dorms decreased 15 percent within three years of launching the initiative, and recycling increased by more than 30 percent, she said. Dining halls have seen a 33 percent reduction in food waste.

"About a year or two ago, we hit this critical mass within the university, where the issue of greening the campus was no longer a fringe issue," Sharp said. "It became a central concern."

Harvard dining halls serve organic produce, compost food waste, and organize weekly farmers markets. Its recycling truck is fueled by waste-kitchen oil. The university also subsidizes half the cost of public transit passes for students and staff and rewards carpoolers with prime parking spots, while raising the price of on-campus parking, resulting in a 10 percent reduction in single-occupant car trips in the last six years, she said.

Students have also pressured university leaders to stay at the forefront of the green curve. Harvard's Environmental Action Committee, an undergraduate environmental advocacy and political group, got 4,500 students to sign a petition last winter urging Drew Faust, university president, to expand teaching and research on climate, energy, and sustainability, and commit to the bold greenhouse gas initiative.

"Students are used to seeing Harvard as a leader in most things," said Zachary Arnold, a junior and cochairman of the committee. "Without a strong commitment and active engagement with this issue, Harvard was in danger of losing its leadership."

Bay State schools that did not make Princeton Review's list of top green colleges this year tout recognition in other rankings.

MIT ranked among the nation's top 25 schools in a recent report card issued by the Sustainable Endowments Institute. A rainwater harvesting system on the school's Cambridge campus cuts potable water use in half. And next year, the university expects to introduce renewable, plant-based biodiesel fuel for its vehicles. It is also studying the potential of mounting wind turbines on several campus buildings.

Interest in environmental sustainability has grown so much among MIT students that the university made grants of up to $20,000 last year to encourage students to pursue energy research, such as mapping energy use in buildings across campus, said Steven Lanou, deputy director for environmental sustainability. The university, like several others, is also developing new courses addressing the issue.

Sierra Magazine, which bestowed the title of "original green school" on Tufts University for developing the nation's first university environmental policy in 1990, named the school one of the top 10 greenest in the country last year. Dorms hold a monthlong energy conservation competition called "Do It In the Dark!"

"The rankings themselves bring credibility to the issue and will push students to think about this in their selection criteria," said Sarah Hammond Creighton, director of Tufts's office of sustainability.