Ithaca, N.Y. — One might not think of community colleges as places where sustainability would take root. But two community-college presidents outlined ways that their institutions have pursued sustainability during a conference that began today here at the Institute for Community College Development at Cornell University.
Mary F.T. Spilde, of Lane Community College, in Oregon, and Kathleen Schatzberg, of Cape Cod Community College, said underfunded commuter campuses can use cooperation, ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and good old grit to make progress in energy efficiency, recycling, water conservation, and other environmental programs.
Ms. Spilde, whose institution is in the very green Northwest, said a number of people on her campus are pushing for sustainability. But while the college has a wealth of enthusiasm, it has a dearth of money.
“I’ve been cutting budget for 9 of the 12 years I’ve been at Lane,” she told the crowd. So the college reinvests money it saves through recycling and energy-efficiency programs.
She talked about “seeding” sustainability efforts throughout the college — creating little programs here and there that add up to an effective whole. If a college starts small in many areas, it can get a lot done without worrying about tackling big projects, which can seem overwhelming.
Establish benchmarks and develop long-term goals, hire a sustainability coordinator, incorporate sustainability into the curriculum, collaborate with other colleges, and assess the progress of the sustainability program, she said. Colleges assess their academic programs — why not their sustainability programs?
This approach has led to various accomplishments at Lane: The campus recycles 60 percent of the waste on its campus. It has reduced energy consumption by 60 percent, and students even started up a small biodiesel plant that provided some fuel for the campus. The college is switching to hybrid vehicles for its fleet and is installing photovoltaic panels on buildings. All food is composted. There is an organic garden on campus, and very little pesticide is used on the grounds.
Ms. Schatzberg pointed to various projects on her campus. Given that it is located on a tiny sliver of land jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, ecological awareness has become a focus there — and students have been one driving force. “This issue is this generation’s Vietnam,” Ms. Schatzberg said.
Persistence has been a key at her college. “If your state is not into [sustainability], you can position yourself as a leader,” Ms. Schatzberg said.
When the food service started composting food waste, the garbage drew a plague of flies. But the college, instead of giving up, came up with a different composting approach that solved the fly problem. In time, the college started selling the compost to a local farm.
But the farmer soon stopped buying the compost, complaining that there were too many contaminants in it. Ms. Schatzberg said the facilities director went to the farm himself and dug through the compost by hand to find the contaminants (which included plastic sanitary gloves and plastic sandwich wrappers) and then figured out how to eliminate them from the waste stream.
The college stopped mowing parts of the grounds, which cut down on campus carbon emissions (long grass sucks up more carbon, and the college is not running wasteful lawn mowers). But people soon complained that the long grass looked unkempt and that it aggravated people’s allergies. The college countered the criticism by marketing the grassy areas as nature restorations. Now other institutions near Cape Cod, such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, are letting their grasses grow.
The college earned media attention for trying out products that were in the research-and-development stage — among them a solar-powered trash compactor, which is the size of an average trash can. “I told our press agent, ‘We are going to do a press conference about a solar-powered trash compactor,’ and he said ‘Ooooh-kay,’” Ms. Schatzberg said. “The press ate it up. We got huge PR out of this.”
The college also pushed the state to build a technology building that was certified LEED gold last year — the first state-financed gold-level building in Massachusetts. Massachusetts now requires all state buildings to achieve LEED silver ratings, in part because officials were impressed with the energy savings in Cape Cod’s building.The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, rating is a benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of “green” buildings.
At the new building’s dedication, Ms. Schatzberg and other college officials cut a power cord instead of a ribbon.
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