Campus Green Builder

By Marya McQuirter, PhD
chocolate & arugula

Bowie State University Students Participate in RecycleMania 2009
Photo Credit: Bowie State University

RecycleMania is an annual competition that encourages colleges and university students to reduce waste on their campuses. The 2010 RecycleMania, which started on 17 January and ends 27 March, is in high gear.

Students compete within their schools and against other schools by:

1. collecting the largest amount of recyclables per capita
2. collecting the largest amount of total recyclables
3. using the least amount of trash per capita
4. having the highest recycling rate

Participating HBCUs include:

• Bowie State University
• Coppin State University
• Delaware State University
• Florida A & M University
• Grambling State University
• Howard University
• Jackson State University
• Morgan State University
• Spelman College
• Texas Southern University
• University of Maryland Eastern Shore
• Winston-Salem State University

Click here for more information about RecycleMania.

Marya McQuirter, PhD is a sustainability consultant, scholar and blogger based in Washington, DC. She works with universities, businesses and non-profits on researching, writing and marketing their sustainability portfolios. She also lectures widely on sustainability and writes about sustainability on her blog, chocolate & arugula.

By Peter Bardaglio, Senior Fellow, Second Nature

New combined heat and power plant at Cornell
Photo Credit Cornell University

Not all green buildings on campus come with lots of windows and sunlight. I recently attended the grand opening of Cornell University's new Combined Heat and Power Plant. Given the quality of the conversation about climate change in the U.S. these days, it’s easy to get discouraged and cynical. But I came away from this particular event feeling like Cornell had taken a real step forward. The new plant will allow Cornell to stop using coal in 18 months and will reduce the university’s carbon footprint by 28 percent. Getting off coal power and hooking up to an interstate natural gas pipeline that runs close by the campus will also save 100,000 gallons a year of diesel fuel used to deliver the coal by truck from West Virginia mines. Now that’s green by anyone’s standards. 

Especially impressive was President David Skorton’s strong expression of support for the ACUPCC at the opening. "When I signed the President's Commitment," he said, "I did not know how we would get to climate neutrality, but I did have faith in our collective ability as a university to educate and discover our way through, and today is an example of finding a piece of the larger puzzle. Although we are celebrating today, we have a long hill yet to climb."

After the remarks and a press conference, I took a tour of the new 15,000-square-foot facility located next to the old coal-fired central heating plant. It was hard to miss the two giant turbines fired by natural gas that drive the electric generators. As was explained to us over the din of the turbines, very little goes to waste; heat from the turbines makes steam that runs another generator and that steam is piped throughout the campus for heating. In fact, so little energy is wasted that solar collectors had to be installed to provide heat and hot water for the new offices and locker rooms attached to the facility!

When thinking about Cornell's switch from coal to natural gas, here's something to keep in mind: only one-third of the energy in coal actually gets used to generate electricity. The rest goes up the smokestack along with much greater carbon emissions than natural gas. Thanks to mountaintop removal, more than 470 mountains in four Appalachian states (West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee) have been destroyed to date providing coal for power plants such as the one that Cornell is shutting down (see "How Do You Kill a Mountain?"). Given the inefficiency of coal, that means only about 156 of those mountains went into producing electricity. The other 314 mountains were not only destroyed, they were a complete waste. Cornell's new power plant will be running at something like 85% efficiency and natural gas emits far less carbon than coal. The obvious conclusion: natural gas may be "bad," but it's dramatically less bad than coal.

No wonder the Sierra Club will be holding Cornell up as a model as it seeks to get other universities and colleges to close down their coal-fired power plants (see Campuses Beyond Coal). One down and (about) fifty-nine to go!

By Marya McQuirter, PhD
chocolate & arugula

Photo Credit: Spelman College

Do you have a green building project in the planning stage on your campus? Or is there a project already underway? If so, don't let the facilities and construction managers have all of the fun. As administators and faculty members, you have an excellent opportunity to leverage green building projects throughout the entire campus.

Here are 4 ways administrators can leverage sustainability throughout their institutions:

• Chronicle the green building process on your website
• Invite students to blog about the green building process
• Brand the university as a 'green' institution using the new construction as one example

Here are 4 ways faculty can leverage sustainability in their classes:

• If you assign student projects, incorporate the green building process
• If you teach a foreign language, have students write about green building and translate it
• Assign readings related to sustainability that would give meaning to the green building process
• Design/co-teach a new class on sustainability using the green building process as the anchor

If you have already leveraged the green building process, please share by leaving a comment below or emailing me at mmcquirter@gmail.com.

If you would like to learn more about advancing sustainability in the curriculum, you can attend AASHE's excellent 2-day Sustainability Across the Curriculum Leadership Workshop. I attended the January 2010 workshop at Emory University with faculty and administrators from more than 25 institutions in the U.S. and Canada. Click here for information about the next workshop.

Marya McQuirter, PhD is a sustainability consultant, scholar and blogger based in Washington, DC. She works with universities, businesses and non-profits on researching, writing and marketing their sustainability portfolios. She also lectures widely on sustainability and writes about sustainability on her blog, chocolate & arugula.

By Richard Johnson, Director of Sustainability, Rice University

When are reductions in energy consumption verifiable savings?

With the emergence of the ACUPCC and increasing focus on energy costs and supplies, universities across America are pursuing measures to reduce their energy consumption and their greenhouse gas emissions. As these schools attempt to measure their results and document savings, I ask how do they really know when they are saving energy?

Let’s assume that a campus building is metered for all utilities, and that these utilities can be tracked on a weekly basis. And further, let’s assume a two-week experiment, and that at the beginning of the second week space temperatures in the building are changed as part of a new campus building temperature policy to reflect what is considered to be a more efficient range. If the meter readings were lower in week two than week one, can a utility manager conclude that the energy conservation measure was a success? Given our experience at Rice University, we would argue that the answer is no.

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By JR Fulton, Architect, LEED® AP, Housing and Food Services, University of Washington;
Kurt Haapala, AIA , LEED® AP, Associate Mahlum; and
Ron van der Veen, AIA, LEED® AP, Principal Mithun, AASHE Board of Directors

Energy efficient buildings can be designed, built or renovated to use less than half of their present operational energy while maintaining high quality, health, and comfort. This can be done without significant capital investment costs. Energy efficient buildings cost less over the life of the building, reduce the total cost of ownership, reduce energy and operational costs and significantly reduce carbon emissions. Building in energy efficiency can “futureproof” the University and make it more resilient. But you have to ask for it!

In order to significantly reduce our future carbon footprint in campus construction, it is necessary to provide a very strong focus on energy efficient buildings. One of the most prudent ways to do this is to require an aggressive energy reduction requirement for all university new building and major renovation projects. The Architecture 2030 organization has created the 2030 Challenge that provides the framework for producing energy efficient buildings now and carbon neutral buildings by 2030. Adopting and mandating a building energy efficiency standard like the 2030 Challenge for campus construction will significantly reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. The 2030 Challenge should be a cornerstone of your Climate Action Plan.

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By Jeffrey M. Baker, Director, Office of Laboratory Operations, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy

Commercial buildings account for 19% of the nation’s energy consumption, according to the Energy Information Administration, so when the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) decided to build a new office building to house its staff, energy performance was naturally a top priority. The new Research Support Facilities (RSF), currently in construction on the campus of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is utilizing a wide variety of energy efficiency measures to reduce energy consumption by 50% over standard commercial buildings. But the goal to achieve a LEED Platinum rating didn’t override a focus on cost. The RSF’s construction costs are competitive with today’s less energy efficient commercial buildings, proof that energy efficiency doesn’t have to come at a premium.

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By Amy Seif Hattan, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Second Nature

Back in 1999, before the days of carbon cap-and-trade and An Inconvenient Truth, I was working as the sustainability coordinator for Middlebury College in Vermont. The lessons I learned then are still relevant today when many colleges and universities are just now constructing their first green building.

We were ahead of the curve at Middlebury at that time. When I arrived, Middlebury was in the process of building its first green building, a science facility called “Bicentennial Hall.” This was the most ambitious building project in the college’s history at that time, and the success of this project led to a campus-wide decision that every new building constructed following Bicentennial Hall would be “green.” In the following few years, I would participate in the process of building two new green residence halls, a green dining facility, a green library, and a new recycling facility, as well as in the sustainable deconstruction of the old science center in which 97% of the materials were reused.

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By Steve Muzzy, Program Manager, Second Nature

This afternoon I headed out with a group of about 30 attendees of the 2009 ACUPCC Climate Leadership Summit for a pre-conference workshop to tour green buildings on two local campuses here in Chicago. Our group consisted of university chancellors, sustainability directors, chief financial officers, and engineering firm presidents.

First up was St. Xavier University, where they are “moving forward faster by building green!" Paul Matthews, Assistant VP for Facilities Management, and the staff at office of sustainability led us on tours of O'Brien Hall and Rubloff Hall - two LEED Gold certified residences. St. Xavier is one of eleven schools in the United States with 2 LEED Gold buildings and the only university in Chicago with two LEED Gold buildings. For Rubloff Hall, St. Xavier invested about $270,000 in energy efficient and renewable energy features - an estimated premium of about 3.7% that will yield approximately $55,000 in annual savings, and has an expected payback period of 4.9 years. St. Xavier President, Judith A. Dwyer signed the ACUPCC as a Charter Signatory, and reducing energy demand (and associated greenhouse gas emissions) through green building will be an important piece of moving toward climate neutrality.

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