The Greening of Campus Life

By Joel Makower, Grist.org. Posted October 3, 2006.

The dawn of the new school year has brought with it a corps of fresh-faced ideas and initiatives aimed at making colleges and universities cleaner and greener. And, like any freshman class, they are all beaming with potential: Most will succeed, a handful will excel, and a few will end up disappointing their parents.

The greening of academe is nothing new, but it seems to have taken root in a big way. Today, it's not just about doing a few good, green things -- recycling, buying green energy, building green buildings, and all the rest -- and it's not just about saving money or being seen as a good neighbor. It's about being seen as a sustainability leader in order to attract students, funding, and media attention.

As a result, in a growing number of schools, "green" has become the Big Meme on Campus.

But getting colleges and universities to make the grade as environmental leaders is no slam dunk. Like their corporate counterparts, schools face a variety of challenges and barriers, from a lack of top-level commitment, to institutional inertia, to a dearth of answers to the seemingly simple question "How good is 'good enough'?"

Companies and activist groups alike are trying to help schools answer that question. For example, General Electric and mtvU recently launched an ecomagination Challenge, with a $25,000 prize for the school proposing "the most impactful and innovative project to 'green' their campus." It joins the Campus Climate Challenge, an activist-led network of more than 300 schools promoting leadership on global warming.

So, how do you green a school? When viewed through a green lens, colleges and universities are, in fact, businesses. A decent-sized school can combine the environmental footprint of a myriad of operations: office buildings, hotels, food service, laundry, retail, vehicle repair and maintenance, energy production, waste hauling, construction, health care, even road building and small manufacturing. And if there is scientific research going on, it may involve a witch's brew of hazardous chemicals and materials, from urethane to uranium.

Forget a business. A college is actually more like a small city.

A matter of policy

So, how do we make all that activity safe for people and the planet? First, someone's got to take the lead. At some schools that leadership comes from the administration and faculty. At others, it comes from the real powers that be: the students themselves.

Historically, students have been the major drivers, says Julian Dautremont-Smith, associate director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. "They can make things happen in a way that staff or faculty haven't. That said, there is increasingly leadership from school presidents that are committed to these issues. It's developed into a more high-level activity. Schools are trying to compete -- be the leader in environmental studies or sustainability."

Inevitably, though, it takes a village. For example, at the University of California campuses, students have proposed dozens of policies that have been embraced by administrators, from green building designs to organic produce in the dining halls. Student representatives from throughout the UC system created the California Student Sustainability Coalition "to fight for a sustainable University of California," according to the group's website. Activist groups have played a role. A campaign sponsored by Greenpeace targeted system-wide policy changes to bring green buildings and renewable energy to all UC campuses. (Full disclosure: My firm, Clean Edge, authored a report funded by Greenpeace as part of that campaign.)

The UC administration has pitched in, too. The university system's governing body, the UC Regents, approved a Green Building Policy and Clean Energy Standard [PDF] in 2003, which mandates that new buildings outperform state energy-efficiency requirements by at least 20 percent. And in the UC's Office of the President, there sits a "sustainability specialist."

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