Quad-City area colleges prepared to handle the short-term costs of ‘green’ initiatives

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By Alma Gaul | Sunday, March 23, 2008 |

Joe Ramos works full time to handle the recyclables at Augustana College in Rock Island. (Jeff Cook/QUAD-CITY TIMES) Buy this Photo

In a time of increasing concern over global warming and sustainability, Quad-City area colleges and universities have taken wide-ranging steps to be more environmentally friendly, including trying to reduce their own energy consumption and educating students in the fields of solar and wind energy.

Among the examples:

-- Augustana College in Rock Island has pledged to reduce its energy consumption by 2 percent per year for 15 years so that, by 2023, it will be using almost 30 percent less energy than it does now.

-- Black Hawk College hopes to build a multimillion-dollar, 2-megawatt wind turbine at its East Campus near Kewanee, Ill., that would provide 100 percent of the electrical needs there, with construction beginning as early as 2010.

-- St. Ambrose University has buried seven 3,000-gallon tanks on its Davenport campus that will store rainwater from downspouts on a new hall now under construction. The capture will reduce flooding in the Locust Street area and will provide water that can be used later for landscaping.

In a time of rising energy costs, some steps simply make good economic sense.

“We’re interested in the economics since the cost of energy is skyrocketing,” said Patricia Keir, the chancellor of the Eastern Iowa Community College District, or EICCD, that oversees Scott, Muscatine and Clinton community colleges. “We’re trying to reduce our expenses.”

Switching to more energy-efficient light bulbs and installing variable-frequency drives on various pumps and motors so they do not run at 100 percent when demand is only

50 percent have become routine good business practices.

But the actions go beyond saving money. In some instances, in fact, “going green” costs more, at least in the short term.

The institutions also are driven by a sense of responsibility and ethical obligation to do what they can to address global warming and its predicted effects, including rising oceans, water scarcity, damaged ecosystems and threatened food supplies.

“We’re doing this in part because there is a global crisis,” Augustana President Steven Bahls said of the college’s sustainability initiatives. “And this is one of the most important issues for young people. This is the issue of their time.”

Added Keir, “Human activities are responsible for the problem (global warming) and, working together, humans have the capacity to solve the problem.”

Challenge greater than believedThe need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions specifically is pressing and may be far more difficult to achieve than previous research suggested, according to an article published earlier this month by Juliet Eilperin on The Washington Post newspaper’s Web site, washingtonpost.com.

But colleges and universities can make a difference, their leaders believe.

The U.S. higher-learning sector consists of more than 4,100 institutions that collectively produce 19 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the National Wildlife Federation, which supports a campus ecology Web site.

Institutions are tackling the issue on multiple fronts: trying to reduce their own carbon footprint, providing leadership in their communities, conducting research and educating their students, both in the broad sense of informing them of sustainability issues and the more narrow sense of training them to work in such fields as solar and wind energy.

How to go about it?

Both Augustana and the EICCD have involved their campus communities by convening groups of students, faculty and staff/administration to brainstorm ideas and help draft plans to guide and monitor progress.

At Augustana, a 20-member environmental task force met throughout the 2006-07 academic year, drafting a plan that was presented to the president and adopted by the college’s board of trustees in October.

It is an ambitious, far-reaching document that entails significant change for the college, and it is going to cost some money, Bahls said.

“Is it expensive? Yes,” he said. “Is it going to take time? Yes. Would it be easy not to do? Yes.”

In addition to its pledge to reduce energy consumption, the plan calls for Augustana to spend $10 million over the next several years to install more energy-efficient windows in its 18-year-old library, and led to the hiring in January of a part-time employee to act as a liaison between the college and builders to make sure new construction projects meet high environmental standards.

The plan also established a full-time, 14-member sustainability committee charged with making recommendations, raising awareness, coordinating programs and making various assessments, such as the feasibility of annually reporting the average miles per gallon of the college’s vehicle fleet or the college’s total water use.

“One of the things we learned is that there is enormous breadth to sustainability,” said Kevin Geedey, an associate professor of biology who chaired the task force. “A plan like this can affect basically everything a college does.”

At Eastern Iowa, chancellor Keir signed in September a document called the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, an initiative designed to promote awareness, leadership and action on the part of America’s higher-education institutions to address the climate challenge.

“Our board had (already) created a policy on sustainability, and I really felt that, by signing that commitment and going public, it would help us keep on task,” she said. “There are a lot of reports and things required to make sure we really move forward.”

The commitment is a document drafted by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, a nonprofit group founded in 2005 and based in Lexington, Ky., for the purpose of coordinating and strengthening campus sustainability across the country.

Institutions that sign on are asked to undertake specified tasks to eliminate their campus’ greenhouse gas emissions over time and ultimately to achieve climate neutrality.

To brainstorm ideas, Keir organized a retreat at her Bettendorf home in mid-November, inviting all students, administrators and staff/faculty members to participate.

From that have evolved seven 10-member teams responsible for studying specific areas such as new construction or curriculum. The teams are to develop plans of action that may be submitted yet this month, EICCD staffer Julie Plummer said.

How to measure progress is a key component of any goal, and Eastern Iowa is one of three colleges in Iowa participating in a pilot program to develop a rating tool that could be used by other institutions nationwide.

Augustana does not plan to sign the AASHE document; Bahls and the college’s trustees prefer their own plan and think it ultimately will accomplish more.

“Our emphasis is on a plan for Augustana College,” he said. “This is a plan we’re going to do. This is an action document. This is hard. We’re taking the hard route.”

Neither St. Ambrose nor Black Hawk has had campuswide discussions, but they might in the future.

Alex Cahill, vice president of the Student Government Association at St. Ambrose, said he and a group of students met with Sister Joan Lescinski, the university president, about “a more institutional response” to sustainability.

“In time, we may likely do that,” Lescinski said about getting groups together to draft a guiding statement. “There are many factors to consider, and it’s important to make sure we conduct a thorough examination of this issue and our response, followed by careful and comprehensive planning.”

Personal responsibilityAnother aspect of the Augustana plan that Bahls thinks is crucial to its success is that it urges all members of the campus community to reduce their individual consumption.

One of the responsibilities of the sustainability committee is to access “the willingness of students, faculty and staff to accept energy conservation measures, even if those measures mean a change in daily life” and the “willingness of students to accept larger tuition increases for energy conservation measures that have a lengthier payback period.”

Jeffrey Strasser, a geology professor and chairman of the sustainability committee, echoes Bahls’ concern that personal responsibility is key — and not easy.

“I think the single biggest challenge (of committee members) is encouraging individuals in the community to individually make choices to use less — less energy, less water, less paper,” he said. “It’s a daunting task.”

Alma Gaul can be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or agaul@qctimes.com.

DEFINITIONS

Sustainability

Many cite the United Nations’ definition of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The definition considers that while development may be essential to satisfy human needs and improve quality of life, it should be done in a way that the capacity of the natural environment to meet present and future needs is not compromised.

Climate neutrality

This is defined as having no net greenhouse gas, or GHG, emissions, to be achieved by minimizing emissions as much as possible through conservation, and by using carbon offsets or other measures to mitigate the remaining emissions.

Purchasing offsets may involve investing in wind turbines, solar energy farms or reforestation projects, for example, and earning carbon credits that work to essentially negate an equivalent amount of carbon emissions, although details can be unclear. This way, net global emissions do not increase.

LEED certification

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification is a program of the U.S. Green Building Council, an eight-year-old national organization with its headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Components of LEED standards might include the use of recycled materials in construction, natural light, energy-efficient artificial light, energy-efficient windows, low-flow faucets and sensors that automatically turn off lights when rooms are not in use.

The council also offers training courses, all intended to lessen the impact of buildings on the environment.

ON THE WEB

** To read Augustana College’s entire environmental plan, visit augustana.edu/x556.xml.

** To read more about the Sustainable Campus Initiative of the Eastern Iowa Community College District, visit eicc.edu/internal/sustainable/index.html.

** To read the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, visit presidentsclimatecommitment.org/html/commitment.php.

** To learn more about the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, or AASHE, a nonprofit group that drafted the climate commitment, visit aashe.org/conf2008.

** To learn more about the Illinois Green Government Coordinating Council, visit standingupforillinois.org/green.

** To learn more about the Campus Ecology program of the National Wildlife Federation, visit nwf.org/campusEcology/index.cfm.

To read the other stories in the series

For St. Ambrose University recycling is no longer ‘an option but a responsibility’