Maine campuses embrace sustainability

Maine Today
October 12, 2006

A recycling bin for empties in the dorm foyer doesn't cut it anymore.
College and university campuses have gone green big-time in the past few years. Lecture halls are heated with biodiesel fuels, the food in the dining hall is grown down the street, and the leftovers are composted.

By embracing the sustainability movement, schools hope to contain soaring energy costs, show the rest of the world what can be done to help reverse climate change, and even win the notice of potential students.

"We ought to mirror the action that we expect in society, and for us to be irresponsible polluters is even less acceptable than for anyone else," said David Hales, president of the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, which this fall became the first college in the nation to adopt a "net zero" greenhouse gas emissions policy.

The policy means the college will use less fuel to reduce its own emissions or invest in activities such as wind power to offset the emissions created by the college, including travel to and from the school by students.

Most Maine colleges have set up sustainability committees and sustainability offices complete with staff who issue newsletters and ensure that new construction is up to the latest environmental standards.

Some Maine colleges have joined the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, a Portland, Ore., group formed last year to promote environmentally sound practices with a membership of more than 160 colleges and universities.

Katherine Creswell, an intern with Bowdoin College's Sustainability Office, said a survey of incoming freshmen this year showed that they shopped for colleges with the environment in mind.

"Overwhelmingly they said they all care and looked at schools with sound environmental practices that were in keeping with their beliefs," Creswell said.
Her office is working closely with the admissions office to make sure that Bowdoin's sustainability programs are prominently displayed on the admissions office Web site and that tour guides mention the environmentally focused efforts taking place.
This fall, a host of new initiatives kicked off at Maine colleges and universities.

HEATING WITH VEGETABLE OIL

The University of New England in Biddeford is experimenting with citrus-based cleaners and is heating one of its buildings with vegetable oils this year after converting its fleet of diesel vehicles to biodiesel last year. The two projects percolated up from students and faculty members before receiving an endorsement to go ahead from the university's environmental council.

"The university recognizes this is a high priority for many students," said Matt Haas, assistant vice president of campus services.

At Unity College, students are raising their own meat for the first time on 40 acres of what had been unused pasture. The point is to wean the campus from trucking meat in from the Midwest, burning fossil fuels in the process, said coordinator Aimee Sawyer.

The students started out with seven Katahdin sheep. Three will be slaughtered soon and served as burgers and stew at the campus student center. The others will be kept for breeding. The students are also caring for 10 beef cattle on loan to the college to determine whether a beef operation will work.

Sawyer said setting up a sheep and cattle ranch on a college campus can be complicated, especially if the student body, like Unity's, includes a mix of animal rights activists and hunters. The student handbook was revised just in case to include a section on disciplinary actions that would result from tampering with the animals in any way.

Most students seem to understand the value of raising meat on campus, said Eric Bragg, a senior from Thetford, Vt., and president of the campus chapter of Future Farmers of America.

Bragg said the exercise has also taught students about sustainable farm practices, such as organically reclaiming a field for pasture while ensuring the grass offers top nutritional value.

"We are really utilizing the land to full potential," he said.

COMMUNAL BICYCLES

Bowdoin students launched the Bowdoin Communal Bike Club to entice people to stop driving and start pedaling instead, said coordinator Ben Lake, a senior from Stillwater, Minn. The bikes are placed strategically around the campus for use by any club members. The program grew out of two years of discussions and surveys to determine whether anyone was interested. The project got the go-ahead and even a small budget from the student activities council.

The bikes were largely donated by campus security, which winds up with racks of unclaimed bikes each year. Lake has been slowly repairing them and painting them bright yellow. The first two bikes, dubbed Annabel and Beatrice, hit the campus late last month.

"I have been getting a lot of positive feedback," Lake said.

Already more than 50 people have signed up for the club, paying $1 in dues annually in exchange for the combination to the bike locks.

Faculty at the University of Southern Maine are being trained to incorporate sustainability issues into their lectures, thanks to a program initiated last year by Sandy Wachholz, an associate professor of criminology. She believes it's possible to make environmental issues relevant to any discipline.

"We look at it in the context of spraying pesticides to eradicate illegal drugs and the impact of that on the environment," she said.

So far 30 teachers have gone through the program.

KITCHEN COMPOSTING

The University of Maine at Farmington is about to expand its kitchen composting program, adding compostable to-go containers and eating utensils made from corn byproducts to the retail food counter. Last year the campus composted 24,000 pounds of kitchen waste, such as vegetable peelings and old bread. This year all scraps left on plates are also composted, said Chris Kinney, dining services director.

"It is the right thing to do and an exciting thing to do," he said.

Last week seven College of the Atlantic students flew off to a United Nations global climate conference in Nairobi, Kenya, but only after purchasing carbon offsets, which involves paying a company to reduce the amount of carbon dixoide in the atmosphere by the same amount contributed by the buyer's activity, such as traveling.

Matt McInnis, 19, a sophomore from Portland, paid about $50 for his offset, which will be used to introduce clean energy into the grid. He even purchased carbon offsets to cancel out his family's carbon emissions.

"They were really pretty psyched about it," he said.

Staff Writer Beth Quimby can be contacted at 791-6363 or at: bquimby@pressherald.com