Creative thinking on campus

The University of Idaho Sustainability Center is a campus-based institute, but its reach extends far beyond the classroom setting. With a focus on ways to improve conservation and cut back on the Moscow, Idaho, school’s environmental impact, the nascent center is changing the way a campus impacts an entire community. The university has always been known as much for its hillside splendor as its academic offerings. In recent years, the campus has adopted an even “greener” outlook thanks in part to the Sustainability Center’s numerous projects that promote sustainable practices in real-world conditions. “This was actually the first sustainability center in the Northwest,” says Alecia Hoene, communications coordinator for UI’s Environmental Science Program. She said there the center started because there was so much demand for sustainability knowledge on campus that a student fee initiative was put together in 2006 to fund the program. The center is led by three faculty staff members with the help of eight student employees, and oversees funding for a variety of student-led projects with short-term and long-term goals, all of which are leading the university toward a shared target: a carbon-neutral future by 2030. Through grants the center has instituted various programs, from infusing conservation into campus operations and curriculum and reducing landfill waste, to planting native plants and engaging more students in sustainable practices that carry over into everyday life. In addition, the Sustainability Center offers service learning and outreach opportunities for students, including an expanding selection of online courses, and educational events. In four years, the center has launched a long list of sustainability efforts, many of which expand upon the basic concept of changing out old lights for energy-efficient bulbs. Some of the center’s successes include: engaging almost 3,000 students in sustainability activities over the course of three years, with 750 students participating in service-learning projects in fall 2009 alone; hosting about 60 events/campaigns to raise both campus/community awareness on a variety of topics; kicking off a “Get Rooted” native planting program last year that has resulted in more than 3,000 native trees and shrubs taking root around campus; passing a university-wide Green Building Policy requiring all new construction and remodels to meet at least LEED Silver standards; and starting a composting program earlier this year that will reduce campus dining waste by 90 percent. While the list of on-going and upcoming projects keeps growing, changing people’s habits is perhaps the center’s most important task, says Darin Saul, the Sustainability Center’s director. “For all these issues there’s no single problem and no single approach,” he offers. “So what we have found is that it takes a bunch of small things to coordinate together to get something to change.” Small changes have created big results. For example, student volunteers stood next to the trash bins in the dining hall for a semester to remind people to compost their leftovers, a step that significantly helped reduced waste. All of the university’s compostable waste, including the occasional animal carcass and manure pile, is now lumped together and used for animal bedding and other projects. The center also eliminated plastic products in the lunch room and brought in starch-based materials that are recyclable. “With that, we’re supposed to achieve a 90 percent reduction in food waste on campus and save about 100 tons of waste annually,” says Jeannie Matheison, a sustainability advisor at the Sustainability Center. “We’re minimizing our waste stream and increasing the stream that’s compostable. It saves money and keeps it local. It’s a great program.” One of the biggest undertakings from the center is the new food service contract with campus dining, which serves more than 5,000 meals every day during the school year. The contract calls for a minimum of 12.5 percent of all food purchases to be locally grown, and nearly three-quarters of the provisions to be regionally supplied. The idea is to commit to low-carbon local shipments through regional purchases on campus. “To meet that goal, we want to buy as much local food as possible within our food shed, within our region,” Matheison says. “We want to build partnerships with entities off campus, too.” Meat, flour, legumes, grain and dairy products are readily available in the Palouse, Matheison adds. With the added benefit of the Soil Stewards program at UI, a 3-acre, student-operated organic farm, and an on-campus dairy that produces some 600 to 800 of gallons of milk, the university has the potential to strengthen the local food supply chain without relying on more far-off shipping methods. “So we want to source as much local produce as we can to campus dining,” Matheison explains. Another successful student-run program revolves around coffee grounds. The Moscow Coffee Compost Project, also known as MoCoPro, started as a student grant project in 2008, but it’s become a community-wide tradition, Matheison says. Every day, up to 30 student volunteers collect grinds from a handful of coffee shops on campus and other major retailers around Moscow, averaging 300 to 400 pounds each week. The compostable materials are then donated to several businesses and organizations in the area, including the Soil Stewards garden, the Palouse-Clearwater Environmental Institute, and community members around the region who seek out the grounds. Before some of the projects are given a green light, they undergo a feasibility check through other departments on campus. So a proposal for a Climate Action Plan, for example, might become a research project for an environmental science undergrad. Then, it would possibly go to an engineering student for further testing, and finally a business student for some fine-tuning in the marketing and finance areas. “That’s what we kind of focus on is using the campus as a living laboratory,” Matheison offers. With the service work that the students perform, the center also provides invaluable hands-on learning. “It’s not only classroom learning, but getting students out of the class so the lessons carry over into real-world practices,” says Sustainability Center director Saul. “There’s a ton of work still to do. But with the various programs we have in place and the others that are in the works, they’ve become very much ubiquitous on campus, and it’s our part to foster sustainable practices so they become a part of the campus life.”