Warren Wilson College, Asheville, N.C.
Colleges are going green to save the planet and some money, too. Warren Wilson’s EcoDorm, built in 2003, was the first college building to earn the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design’s (LEED) highest rating—the Platinum certification—for existing buildings.
University of Colorado at Boulder
UC-Boulder topped Sierra Club’s greenest colleges list in 2009. The school partnered with the National Renewable Energy Labs to create these wind turbines at the Wind Research Park, south of Boulder, to feed energy into a grid benefitting all of Colorado.Ithaca College, Ithaca, N.Y.
Ithaca’s Dorothy D. and Roy H. Park Center School for Business and Sustainable Enterprise opened in 2008. Featuring a vegetated roof that reuses storm water runoff, it is the first undergraduate business school in the world to earn the LEED Platinum certification.
The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Wash.
Evergreen’s organic farm is used to teach courses such as organic agriculture. Its organic produce is served in campus eateries, sold through a Community Supported Agriculture program and a twice-weekly farm stand on campus, and donated to local food banks.University of New Hampshire, Durham, N.H.
UNH’s EcoLine, completed in 2009, is the nation’s first major university to create a landfill gas-to-energy project. The school is the first to use landfill gas as its primary fuel source, which will power up to 85 percent of the campus’s electricity and heat.University of California, Santa Barbara
Bren Hall, which houses the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC-Santa Barbara, is the nation’s first building to earn two LEED Platinum certifications. It features roof solar panels to help power the building and is made of recycled materials.
College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine
A member of the school’s Campus Committee on Sustainability helps compost food, an effort the school has been involved in since its 1972 founding. The student residences and dining hall have compost bins. The compost feeds the college’s organic community gardens.Arizona State University, Tempe, Ariz.
ASU’s School of Sustainability was launched in 2007 as the first sustainability degree-granting institution in the nation. It earned a LEED Silver certification and features energy- and water-efficient fixtures, recycled flooring, and rooftop wind turbines.University of California, Santa Cruz
At UC-Santa Cruz, food waste is composted and approximately 24 percent of the produce served in dining halls is organic. The trayless dining program has successfully reduced food waste by 40 percent, and saves an estimated 30,000 gallons of water per month.Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vt.
The college’s $12 million biomass plant is its most significant step toward becoming carbon neutral by 2016. The biomass boiler cuts the use of heating oil in half, reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent, and generates 20 percent of the campus’s electricity.Comment:
These are different collages i looked at whom are involved or started up environmental sustainable initiatives as part of their curriculum and each initiative has benefitted the schools, colleagues, students, parents, teachers and communities differently. These are schools in the United states that have seen this problem and are coming up with different solutions for creating a sustainable environment.
Each college offers different ways in which they contribute to environmental sustainability.
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