How Green is Green?

By Ryan Catanese

December 1, 2008

Elaine Durr, Elon's first full-time sustainability coordinator

Have you noticed anything different on Elon’s campus lately?

Have you seen the signs around campus for locally-grown food?  Have you noticed that Elon security now has several Smart Cars in their fleet?  Or maybe you have seen the shiny new Priuses parked outside of Moseley that are dedicated for student use?

There is a spectrum of views on sustainability.  Some think that it is of the highest importance, and some think it is less of a priority.

Regardless of what your stance is, Elon is spending a lot of money to be more sustainable, so if you are a student here, this pertains to you.

In 2006, Elon created an Environmental Council, and in 2008, hired a full-time employee, Elaine Durr, whose sole job it is to push Elon towards a more sustainable future.  So what have they done?

Why now?

This has certainly been an issue that has been a long time coming.  After all, the 2008 Presidential election was not the first time that energy was one of the major platforms in an election; it has been talked about since the Jimmy Carter campaign in the 1970’s.

So why now?

“I think a lot of it has to do with Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth,” Durr said.  “It’s unbelievable how many people that I talk to that relate their interest in the environment to Al Gore’s book.”

On October 22^nd, Durr hosted a viewing of a live webcast on college sustainability and climate change.  On the webcast, Anthony Cortese, the founder of Second Nature, an organization focused on the teaching of environmental sustainability in institutions of higher learning, said, “People didn’t think that they were contributing to the problem.  That was a hard pill to swallow.”

Another reason important reason is that traditional dirty energy is finally hitting people where it hurts.

“If you hit someone’s wallet, they start to notice,” said Durr.  “Gas prices are going up so people are thinking more about how they drive, how far they drive, and what they drive.”

While these topics are all very publicly visible, there are other concerns that don’t receive as much of the public’s attention.  One of these is landfill space.

“In some areas, there are shortages of landfill space, so recycling is really getting pushed,” Durr said.  “We’ve run out of place to put trash, so recycling has become a huge issue.”

Cortese mentioned the importance of colleges and universities in instigating this sustainability revolution.  “Universities are a $350 billion per year business,” Cortese said.  “With that much money and all of those young minds, they need to be a model.”

But for Durr, the most important thing is awareness.

“As employees of a university, it’s our job to teach, and if we aren’t teaching them about these issues, then we’re not doing our job,” Durr said.

Go Local

There was the removal of trays, the introduction of “greenware,” but if you have been to any of Elon’s dining halls lately, you have probably seen signs boasting about their use of local foods.  Organic food is important for three reasons.

First, it is important economically.

“From my perspective, local food is so important, because you are supporting your local economy, you giving your business to local farmers instead of to somewhere else,” Durr said.  “If you’re an owner of a small farm, it is kind of scary to buy more land and more crops and expand if you don’t know if anyone is going to be there to buy it.  You have to put in some investment, and knowing that the university is interested helps those farmers know that they have a place to sell their product.”

Second, it is energy-wise.  Consider the amount of resources spent transporting food from California as opposed to the amount of resources used to transport food from the farm 20 miles away.

Third, it’s good for the consumer.

“If you’re getting food from 20 miles away as opposed to 2,000 miles away, it is definitely going to be a lot fresher,” Durr said.  If you get it from so far away, they pick it really early and it ripens as it gets to you, but if you pick it and eat it a day later, it is just a lot fresher.”

While Aramark is just starting to track how much of the food on campus is locally grown, it is estimated the 25 to 30 percent of the produce served in the dining halls is grown at local farms.

“We, as a university, are a big buyer of goods and services, so if we ask for these types of things, it will also help the area to have more of these things available to them,” said Durr.

So, be glad that Elon supports local foods, no matter which of the reasons you prefer.

How does our university look green while thinking green?

Back in the Fall of 2006, the Koury Business center and the equally impressive Chandler Fountain made their grand debut to the student body.  There was one problem: North Carolina was in the middle of a drought.

Questions arose in the student body.  How can we use this much water for aesthetics when the rest of our area can’t even water their grass?

How do we claim to be green and continue to look so green?  In brief, storm water.

“Whenever you see an automatic sprinkler head on campus, it is being supplied by storm water,” Durr said.

Storm water, or rain for the laymen, is collected in three lakes on campus: a pond behind the intramural fields on South Campus, Lake Verona, and Lake Mary Nell.  This water is pumped from these lakes into the irrigation system on campus, supplying the automatic sprinkler heads.

“If you look at [Elon's] acreage, we are irrigating about 70 acres with stormwater, and the part that we water with potable water is less than an acre,” Durr said.

While the fountains are filled with potable water, steps are being taken to reduce their impact as well.

“If the fountains are ever drained for anything, they are drained to the ponds so that we can use them for irrigation,” Durr said.  “The vacuum cleaners that they have recently purchased make it so they don’t have to drain the fountains every time they have to clean them out, and from everything that I am hearing, we have the foundation problems fixed with the fountain, so we won’t have to keep refilling them.”

Taking the LEED

Lindner Hall, still under construction, will be Elon’s first LEED certified building.

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, was started by The United States Green Business Council in 1998, as a way to evaluate the sustainable practices of buildings and organizations.  Lindner Hall, still under construction, will be the first building at Elon to undergo the certification process, and is expected to be certified as LEED silver.

There are four levels of LEED certification: certified, silver, gold, and platinum.  While silver is certainly not the highest honor, it is certainly a step in the right direction.

“Silver is a level of certification that is very doable, and can also give us a chance to test the LEED system, to see if it is right for Elon, because sometimes it just doesn’t make sense for everybody,” Durr said.  “The Koury Business Center and Belk have sustainable features in them but never went through the certification process.”

Lindner will have the sustainable features of the older buildings, such as energy-efficient lighting fixtures Energy Star appliances, but will add new features as well.  These include photovoltaic solar panels on the roof, which will offset over seven percent of the building’s energy consumption, and will have a solar hot water heating system.

Overall, being sustainable is a good business move for Elon.

“Universities and colleges picked up on [sustainable buildings], because universities build buildings and they use them for 50 to 100 years, so it is really beneficial to them to make them very energy efficient and water efficient,” Durr said.  “For people who are building a building that are going to sell it and turn it over to somebody, there is not as much incentive to do that.”

These people are serious.  Even the plaque will be sustainable.

“There was concern initially when it started, because you got this huge plaque to hang on the wall and the question arose ‘Why are we putting resources into putting these plaques on the wall?’” Durr said.  “So there are actually options now of what you want your plaque to look like and stuff, and the plaques are made out of recyclable materials now.”

Who else is doing this?

This is not just an Elon initiative.  Many area schools are taking on the charge to be more sustainable.

The BioBuses were just the beginning for Elon’s sustainability plan.

Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have traditionally had strong programs, while smaller colleges like Guilford College and Davidson College have, like Elon, just recently hired Sustainability Coordinators.  Durr, Elon’s Sustainability Coordinator was just hired at the end of the 2007-2008 academic year.

Right now, the goal is for a more collaborative effort.

“What we are trying to do is to get a group together of Triad area Sustainability Coordinators and to meet more frequently to talk about sustainable practices, each other’s successes, and, in a way more importantly, each other’s failures,” Durr said.  “[Sustainability] is a relatively new thing, and there are a lot of things that we are trying to do for the first time and we are learning a lot from each other.”

This is not, however, just a local initiative.  The Sustainable Endowments Institute releases a list of 300 of the most eco-friendly universities across the United States and Canada and rates their sustainable practices in their annual “Green report card,” which can be accessed at http://www.greenreportcard.org.

Topping the list are some big names, like Brown University, Stanford, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania, and some smaller schools as well, like Oberlin College in Ohio, Carleton College in Minnesota, and Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

How do we stack up?

While we have made an impressive start with sustainable practices, there is still a lot to be done.

For example, as mentioned above, Elon University is now building the first LEED certified structure on campus, a true milestone for the school.  Duke University, on the other hand, currently has 20 buildings that are LEED certified or in the process of being LEED certified, including the first LEED Platinum residence hall in the world, the Smart Home.

The University of North Carolina only has one completed LEED building, but is in the process of building five more, three of which will be certified Platinum.

Elon has a great model right down the road at Warren Wilson College.  They were the first school in North Carolina to have a building certified LEED Gold, and they take local food seriously, growing their food on their campus farms.

Other schools, however, have much more established programs.  Locally, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has several people working on sustainable practices, while schools like Stanford University has a Department of Sustainability and Energy Management that is staffed by 13 full-time employees.

Durr, however, says that we are not that far behind.

“There was some recent ranking where Elon got a 94 and Duke got a 97, so we actually aren’t that far behind them,” Durr said.  “They have been doing this as a concerted effort for several more years than us, so I think that we should feel good about that.”

What can we do better?

The truth of the matter is that sustainability is still a very new campaign at Elon, an initiative that is starting to take hold.  The goal, however, is for a drastic change in how things operate on campus.

For example, according to Elon’s Sustainability Policy, one major goal is to reduce energy consumption by 6% every year so that by 2018, we have cut the university’s total energy consumption in half.  According to the Sustainability Master Plan, drawn up in 2006, Elon plans to be completely carbon neutral in the next 30 years.  This is no small task.

“That’s a big goal,” Durr said.  “It’s going to be challenging, and it will be more so as we get further along because we’ve done things like replacing light bulbs.  As we get through the things that are more obvious, it will be more and more difficult.”

According to a recent survey conducted of the Elon campus, 69 percent of students still drive their car, on

average, 6.75 miles per day, while 96 percent of faculty commutes by car an average of 31.78 miles, roundtrip, per day.

For faculty and staff, it seems the only solution is to make an effort to find more localized housing or to provide more carpooling options.  The students are actually doing a decent job of carpooling with about 35 percent of students carpool regularly, while only 14 percent of the faculty and 10 percent of staff are carpooling regularly.

The amount of student drivers, however, is something that can be fixed now.  One way the Town of Elon, in conjunction with the university, is trying to lower the number of students driving is by making it easier to walk and bike around.  This process, however, cannot be rushed.

“One of my concerns is to not make it just ‘here are more places to walk’ but rather ‘here are places to walk safely,’” Durr said.  “There is a lot of interest, not just from the University but the town to have more opportunities to walk and bike, but they unfortunately take a while.”

Elon and Durr’s efforts have not gone unnoticed.  In their annual “Green College Report,” KIWI Magazine listed Elon in a group of 75 schools that will “help your kids help the planet,”

So, for a status update on the progress of Elon’s sustainability campaign, here it is: it takes a while.  As a university, the progress is continuous and the plan is ambitious, but completely changing how a campus operates does not happen overnight.

So be patient, Elon, and keep up the good work.  And the next time you leave your apartment, turn off the lights.