New School Sustainability Committee Blog

New School Sustainability Committee Blog

Rest of the Conference: Broad Strokes The next day I attended the Recycling and Sustainability workshop where presenters Mark Lennon and Rob Gogan discussed the challenges of recycling in a college setting. What came across most to me was the act of recycling as a last ditch effort. The first two R's, reduce and reuse, are actually much more important. Reduction is obvious and leads back to where most sustainability arguments are inevitably drawn: a change in lifestyle, or consciousness. Conservation is the most effective means we have to effect a serious change in our environment. Reuse is the next step after that. Rob Gogan spoke of a campaign he spearheaded at Harvard to collect all of the leftover cosmetic products from the dorms at the end of the semester and bring them to a women's shelter on Valentine's Day. The image of the women running out to the truck remained in my head and got me thinking. To coordinate efforts to literally harvest the many commodities that end up lying around or useless in landfills not only saves the environment but provides precious resources to those who are in need. Rob has organized many such efforts around Harvard, from furniture to used books and cloths. He also spoke of building bridges between the college and the surrounding community. Instead of thinking of Harvard students as invaders who hike up rent and hang out in coffee shops, Cambridge residents can see them, through these recycling efforts, as people who care about the environment that they inhabit and the community that they are infringing upon. This ties into ideas of social sustainability, which he mentioned. Other efforts at Harvard include: A partnership with Allied Waste to convert trash truck to biodiesel and compressed natural gas. This really ultimately saves money, not only in gas but in the disposal of vegetable oil from the school's cafeteria system. A truck burns 2000 gal of biodiesel a year. This not only saves 300$ a month in fuel costs but 50$ a month that would have been spent by the cafeterias to dispose of their fryillator oil and such. Other interesting tidbits: "Stuff Sales" cut trash production by 200 tons and raised 75,462$ in 2006 between selling the items and saving disposal costs. Rob said: "What gets measured gets managed," and I think it is always important to have good data and figures in any environmental movement. Please look up: recyclemaina.org, the college recycling competition. Competition can foster surprisingly good results, especially amongst students. Rob finished with this quote: "If you are not recycling well, how can you possibly convince people that you have a commitment to sustainability?" One of my big recycling questions lately has been: What are the environmental impacts of recycling processing centers? Don't they use alot of fuel and produce pollution that impacts the environment adversely? Is it even worth it to recycle? Rob assured me that this is not the case and that recycling an aluminum can saves eight times the energy that was used to produce that can. He reminded me also of the cost and harm caused by virgin resource extraction. For more information on these recycling issues I urge everybody to look up the websites for the following organizations: The National Recycling Coalition, EPA Wastewise, and the recycling section of the Environmental Defense Fund. The second session I attended was a Sustainability Indicator Session sponsored by some faculty at UVM. Environmental indicator tracking can help a university to become more conscious of its impacts. As was said before: Data needs to be taken, measurements must be made, for us to improve. To take stock of the impacts of a university is a huge product and one must choose from a great amount of variables: solid food waste, electrical energy consumption etc. Please look up the website for "Clean Air, Cool Planet" if you are interested in tracking greenhouse gas emissions. Also the Energy Star program is primarily an emissions reduction effort, check out: portfoliomanager@energystar.gov for more info. One lesson they expressed was that energy performance can be better improved by management over technology. So for all of those who say we need only wait to the next technological advance to save us, think again. Our technology is nothing if we do not manage it correctly and coordinate in order to optimize its performance. Gotta go to the meeting, more later!