The energy and environmental benefits of trayless dining are pretty straightforward. Our story cited that in the United States, "more than 25% of food produced for consumption goes to waste,
and food leftovers are the largest component, by weight, of the waste
stream in the United States." So, when students lose access to trays, they take less food, and therefore less is wasted, which saves money and
also reduces the amount that will eventually produce methane in a landfill
if not composted or treated with an anaerobic digester.
But not everyone eliminates the trays out of concern for the environment. The NYT story highlights Skidmore College's trayless program, which began "between the spring and fall semesters in 2006, when the
cafeteria, the Murray-Aikins Dining Hall, underwent a $10 million overhaul. For the most part, when students returned in the fall, they were so dazzled by
the transformation of the cafeteria that they hardly noticed the missing trays.
The renovated dining hall has three slate fireplaces and a half-dozen food
stations, including a do-it-yourself griddle for eggs. Three of the chefs are
graduates of the Culinary
Institute of America, and all the pasta, granola and baked goods are made on
site. Officials said their decision to go trayless was mainly about atmosphere, though
they welcomed any ecological benefit. 'In our thinking, the trays were
institutional, along with the conveyor belts, and we really wanted to move away
from that,' said Christine Kaczmarek, director of business services at Skidmore."
Of course, Skidmore is only one school to join a growing trend towards trayless dining, which Jonathan Bloom tracks at Wasted Food. The Sustainable Endowments Institute says that 126 of the 300 schools they monitor have experimented with trayless dining, and one ARAMARK study examined meals at 25 colleges and universities to find that on
trayless days, food waste was reduced by 25% to 30% per person,
or about one-quarter to one-half pound of food per person per day.
Richard Johnson, the Director of Sustainability for Rice University in Houston, Texas, also blogged on dropping trays, saying, "Back in the kitchen, the H&D staff reported that plate waste had
dropped 30% (the same amount as had been achieved by the educational
campaign in 2005), and that the use of water, energy, and cleaning
chemicals to wash plates and trays had dropped by almost 10%.They were intrigued.On
a typical day in this particular dining hall, they would spend about
$1000 per lunch period on food costs, not including the labor for
preparation or associated utilities.What if they could reduce the amount of food that they needed to prepare?And not just for lunch, but for dinner and breakfast too (which together cost about another $1,000 per day just for the food)?"
He continues: "We have come to discover that removing the tray is akin to removing a keystone, unleashing a variety of benefits.In
addition to those already discussed, there are additional energy and
labor savings related to reducing the quantity of food to be cooked.Arguably, trayless dining also improves the health of students by discouraging over-eating.I continue to hear from students that they pay more attention to the food that they consume now that the trays are gone."
Image Credit: Dr. Ann C. Wilkie, University of Florida-IFAS
Scott Carlson reports that "about 25 percent of the colleges that should have turned in their
greenhouse-gas reports in September are still delinquent. Of the
colleges that had a deadline in January, nearly half have yet to file."
The American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which has more than 600 signatories, commits schools to working towards climate neutrality, and the first step in that process is creating a public greenhouse gas inventory. As Carlson points out, it is a difficult requirement, but an easier one than those following, which include creating an emissions reduction plan, carrying it out, and integrating sustainability education into the university's curriculum.
However, between budget shortfalls and shifting priorities, many schools have failed to create or publish their emissions report, and some, like the College of Alameda in California, seem to have forgotten entirely. Many of the delinquent schools are small institutions with fewer resources or shrinking enrollments, for whom large investments in sustainability were always a stretch:
"Mr. King says Cabrillo [College] may have to
postpone plans for some renewable-energy projects, like solar panels,
that require upfront investment. The college has plans for a new
building that would be certified platinum in the Leadership in Energy
and Environmental Design program, but budget concerns may require the
college to shoot for a lower certification instead."
Many of the schools that have yet to create an inventory report that their philosophy remains unchanged, and that sustainability remains an important part of the agenda, even in difficult times. The article also notes that supporting organizations, such as Clean Air -- Cool Planet and AASHE, are continuing to reach out to schools that are lagging and provide resources.
But what of the other 75%, who have reported their emissions and are now (presumably) writing their climate action plans? The Chronicle notes in a different story that Butte College, a small, two-year institution in Northern California, has just added three new solar arrays to its existing panels from 2005. The beefed-up system will generate 2.7 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, and is expected to save the school $32.6 million on utility bills in the next 20 years.
{Julian's rundown of the best and worst of 2008 was so good we had to repost it here. Add your own nominations in the comments section below.}
Campus Highlights and Lessons for the
New Year
With presidents leading the way, campuses
shifting to solar energy, record level participation in national education
campaigns and students turning out en masse to vote, 2008 was a banner year for
campus sustainability.
To sustain this momentum in the coming
years and achieve real reductions in pollution on campus, however, we will need
more support for faculty and stronger state and federal leadership. Here are our best and worst picks for 2008:
Best:
Presidents Stepped Up
By December 2008, six hundred and five college and university
presidents in every state of the U.S. had signed the American College
and University President's Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). These
courageous leaders committed their institutions to doing what the
world's scientists urge is necessary: achieving climate neutrality by
or before 2050. Although most of these commitments were secured in
2007, the real push to implement the commitment began in 2008 with most
of the signatories submitting greenhouse gas inventories and taking
immediate steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many have also
begun to develop climate action plans, setting target dates and interim
milestones for becoming climate neutral. In the future, the signatories
have agreed to integrate sustainability into the curriculum and to make
their action plans, inventories and progress reports publicly
available. Credit for this outstanding leadership is due to Dr. Anthony
Cortese and his group, Second Nature, as well as to AASHE and
Eco-America, and of course, first and foremost, to the presidents
themselves.
Butte Threw Down the Gauntlet
As she accepted Butte College's grand prize in the 2008 National
Chill Out Competition, President Diana Van Der Ploeg explained, "Our
goal is to be climate neutral by 2010 and I know that is ambitious, but
I think we can do it." The two-year community college in Oroville, CA
announced in 2008 that it had devised a plan to reduce its direct
emissions of carbon dioxide by 100% by 2015 without relying on carbon
credits. Photovoltaic (solar electric) panels, which currently generate
about 28% percent of the campus' electricity needs, will be expanded to
meet all campus electricity needs within the next several years. Butte
is also successfully moving more than a thousand commuters out of their
cars into the largest community college transportation system in
California while integrating sustainability into its curriculum.
Students Voted for Clean Energy
More Millennials (youth, ages 18-29) turned out to vote this year
than anytime since 1972 and it appears that the prospect of clean
energy and green jobs were part of the draw. By election day, the
Energy Action Coalition's Power Vote campaign had generated almost
350,000 pledges from students and other youth who promised to vote and
to hold decision makers at all levels of government accountable for
shifting to clean energy and creating millions of new green jobs. The
number of pledges collected equals about 1/10 of the total increase in
the youth voter turnout in 2008, providing a signal that youth
enthusiasm for clean energy not only translated to votes, but helped
determine the outcome in most of the swing states in the presidential
election.
We Engaged at Record Levels
The higher education community engaged at record levels in national
sustainability initiatives in 2008. According to event organizers'
tallies, 1,365,250 students, faculty and staff at approximately 2,100
college and universities (that's more than half of all colleges and
universities in the country) participated in a range of events focused
on advancing sustainability and climate action. The largest event by
far (and the largest ever of its kind that we know of in the US on
sustainability and climate action) was the Focus the Nation teach-in
(now known as the National Teach-In) held on January 30, 2008 with an
estimated one million participants at 1,900 campuses. Other
record-breakers included the National Campus Chill Out Competition
Earth Day Awards Broadcast (13,550 participants at 330 campuses made it
the largest campus sustainability and climate action awards program in
the U.S.) and the AASHE conference (1,700 participants from 400
campuses made it the largest higher education sustainability conference
held to date and one of the largest campus environmental conferences
held in two decades). If you add the 350,000 pledges collected by the
Energy Action Coalition during Power Vote, involvement levels in 2008
swell to more than 1.7 million.
Worst:
Faculty Not Keeping Pace
While many college presidents have committed their institutions to
bold action to address climate change, few faculty have caught up with
the vision and management of their campuses. A national study, Campus Environment 2008,
conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International for
the National Wildlife Federation at 1,068 campuses concluded that
little if any progress has been made in educating students for
sustainability since the study was first conducted in 2001. At only a
minority of schools, for example, have fifty percent or more of the
students taken a course on the basic functions of the earth's natural
systems and even fewer have taken courses on the connection between
human activity and environmental health. Areas such as business,
engineering and teacher education still lag far behind the natural and
physical sciences in offering environmental or sustainability courses
within their disciplines. Part of the reason for this may be that only
a minority of campuses have program to support faculty professional
development on environmental or sustainability topics and an even
smaller minority formally evaluate or recognize how faculty have
integrated sustainability topics into their curriculum. Dr. Jean
MacGregor's Curriculum for the Bioregion Initiative
-based at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington-is one of the
leaders in bringing faculty from multiple institutions together to
develop best practices for educating for sustainability within and
among diverse disciplines.
States Slowed Innovation
While it is important to work towards effective federal legislation
to curb GHG emissions in the U.S., there is much that can be done at
the state level to boost innovation. Unfortunately, many states are
missing these opportunities. According to the U.S. Department of
Energy, as of 2008, only 24 states and the District of Columbia have renewable portfolio standards (RPS)
in place that require power generators to generate a specific
percentage of renewable energy by specific dates. Campus renewable
energy programs in states with strong REPS thrived this year, but their
counterparts in other states were at a comparative disadvantage,
including campuses in states with non-binding standards (Illinois,
Virginia, Vermont and Missouri) and in states with no renewable
portfolio standards at all (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida,
Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan,
Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina,
Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming).
Communities Remained Gridlocked
A handful of campuses all across the U.S., including Colorado
University, the University of Montana, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill and the University of Washington have begun to demonstrate
ways to effectively move students, faculty and staff out of
single-occupant vehicles into more sustainable transit options. The
vast majority of campuses, however, remained gridlocked in 2008. The Campus Environment 2008
study revealed that a select few schools offered free or discounted bus
or public transit passes, carpooling or vanpooling programs, or other
incentives not to drive alone in 2008.As we seek solutions in 2009 and
beyond, Will Toor and Spenser W. Havlick's book, Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities
(Island Press, 2004) provides an excellent blueprint for developing
greener transportation plans, transit systems, fleets and more and
Toor's article, "The Road Less Traveled," in Walter's Simpson's new
book, The Green Campus: Meeting the Challenge of Sustainability (APPA, 2008) provides additional insights.
Fossil Fuels Reigned
Although the anecdotal evidence of campuses generating clean power
on site or purchasing carbon credits or renewable energy certificates
is mounting, fossil fuels remained by far the dominant source of energy
in 2008. Eighty-six percent of schools generated no renewable energy
on-site in 2008 at all for heating or cooling; less than 8% purchased
renewable energy certificates or carbon credits to promote cleaner
energy from off-site sources; and less than 12% used wind, solar
electricity, biomass or other clean sources on site to generate
electricity. At carma.org, where it is possible to look up college and
university power plants, it is surprising how many campuses, even with
robust and visible sustainability programs, are running plants that
emit comparatively large amounts of greenhouse gases, using coal and
other relatively polluting fuel mixes. Many of these campus plants are
listed as planning to produce similar or greater CO2 output in the
future and none indicated a planned reduction.
To Conclude:
Ultimately, a dramatic collective reduction in campus global warming
pollution was not the headline this year, but we made considerable
progress. Between hundreds of thousands of student pledges to hold
elected officials accountable for clean energy and green jobs, a
massive teach-in on global warming solutions, and hundreds of
presidents' climate commitments, 2008 signaled a wide-spread
understanding that global warming is a real problem, requiring a
willingness to set what seem like nearly impossible goals in order to
quickly cap and begin to reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases in
the earth's atmosphere.
Confucius said, "When it is obvious the goals cannot be reached,
don't adjust the goals, adjust the action steps." President Diana Van
Der Ploeg of Butte College and hundreds of other college and university
presidents all across the country have signaled a willingness to do
just that, aiming towards climate neutrality with the hard work ethic
and inventive spirit that represents the best of what we have been and
can be as a nation.
The Sustainable Endowments Institute relies heavily on a small core of schools for its College Sustainability Report Card: "colleges and universities with the 300 largest endowments in
the United States and Canada, representing more than $380 billion in
endowment assets, or more than 90 percent of all university endowments."
While 300 is only a small fraction of American colleges and universities (about 13%), the study is designed to examine how schools are using their endowments to work towards sustainability, NOT to rank general sustainability trends. (For a more general overview of trends in higher education, have a look at NWF's Campus Environment 2008 report, which covered more than 1,000 schools of all sizes and types.)
That said, there are a few obvious patterns among the schools who participated. In the good news category, two of every three schools that were evaluated in 2008 and 2009 have improved their scores, with more than four out of five improving since their 2007 rating.
Also good, a majority (66%) of these schools have full-time staff dedicated to sustainability efforts on campus, and most have signed the ACUPCC or made a commitment to massive carbon reductions. Green building, local food purchases, recycling and alternative transportation projects are on the rise. And most importantly for the SEI, endowment transparency and investments in renewable energy are increasing at many schools.The list of all-star schools shouldn't surprise anyone: Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Oberlin, Stanford and and University of Colorado are a few of the top 15, and they well deserve the recognition.
Of course, there are still a few F's among the accolades, some going to schools such as Brigham Young University, Howard University and Hillsdale College, which did not respond to the survey. While the F doesn't mean that these schools don't have any green efforts -- for example, BYU does have a recycling program and student eco-clubs -- it does mean that those efforts are not obvious enough for SEI to track them without the school's involvement, and that the school hasn't yet made it a priority to lead by example. Because the report is intended to rank the schools with the largest endowments, a school's non-participation didn't exempt it from inclusion, as with other sustainability-tracking reports.
Perhaps one of the most refreshing things about this particular report is its web navigability. The site, which is hosted outside SEI's, is designed to be a destination for the competing schools, who can pull up side-by-side comparison charts between any set of schools to compare factor by factor, or year by year. Rather than presenting results in document form, the site makes it easy to move from school to school and filter summaries.
As we and others have discussed before, the plethora of ranking systems raises difficult questions. How do independent organizations weight initiatives that have varying levels of effect on climate and CO2 emissions? Should curriculum shifts or operations changes be prioritized? Is it unfair to favor administration-led changes and ignore small-scale, grassroots involvement? Or should the programs that cut the most carbon be our primary goal? How do we address globalization concerns and find the balance between social justice and the need for open markets? What about habitat, biodiversity, and water quality?
In my (mostly unqualified) opinion, it seems we have a long way to go towards a holistic and healthy relationship with our natural surroundings, as well as the fuels, industry and machinery which have provided such unprecedented educational opportunity. However, I also think that a certain amount of gratitude is in order for the hard work of university presidents and administrators, students, faculty, reporters, researchers, conservation organisations, and supporting nonprofits, which are finally getting some of the attention they deserve.
A few weeks ago, hot on the heels of our Report Card,
came Sierra's annual "Cool Schools"
feature, profiling some truly tremendous campus efforts. Days later, Plenty’s Green
Campuses 3.0 highlighted a few more. Grist
weighed in with a “Top 15” list of
schools more recently, and supplemented their offerings today with a special
series on eco-activism on campus, which focuses on both student work and
operational changes. I could go on with many more illustrious examples of the
media (finally!) paying attention to campus climate efforts, but since these are
just a few of the publications that have written recently about greening efforts
in higher education, and many of them have already gotten coverage on this blog, I’ll stop
there. Back-to-school days are here for sure!
Unfortunately, these articles only rarely delve into the
full-length research studies done by university reviewers and nonprofits. The
magazine coverage is cool, but not nearly as meticulous in its methodology as
some of these studies, as
reported byThe Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings &
Grounds blog.
Our Campus Environment
2008 report falls into this second category, by covering over 1,000 schools in the US
rather than cherry-picking a few for a top ten list. Princeton
Review rated 534 schools in its version, and next week the Sustainable Endowments
Institute is scheduled to release its own Green Report Card, which covers
300 schools that were selected based on their large endowments. AASHE is in the
pilot stages of another system, called STARS,
which is intended to create a common standard for measuring sustainability in
higher education. For a more in-depth comparison of the differences between
these reports (and a few additional ones), see this exellent article
from Inside Higher Ed, which explains
the differences in methodology and intent of the various systems.
The idea of rankings and ratings can be a sticky one. When
dealing with so many schools, impartiality is usually easy, but deciding how to
weight factors is definitely not. Because we here at NWF’s Campus Ecology tend
to focus on climate issues as the greatest threat to wildlife and our own human
habitat, we are more likely to prioritize renewable energy purchasing than
something like a small-scale local food co-op, since the first is more measurable
and directly related to reducing GHG emissions. However, that small food co-op
may be student-driven (as opposed to a facilities dept. decision), and
therefore more likely to engage youth leaders that will go out in to the world
and effect all kinds of change. It is also more personally relatable, since
such food usually tastes better and puts local communities on a more direct
path towards overall sustainability. Depending on the values of an
organization, prioritizing is difficult, and it’s rare that any single entity
can cover everything it wants to in a coherent way.
That difficulty is why we're glad that campus
environmental work is getting so much attention. From the outside, it probably
looks like a lot of noise and competing reports, but most of us in here tend to
look at it as filling in each others’ holes, raising new solutions and doing our best to support the colleges at the forefront of investing in a new energy future. Surely, it’s
a wonderful development that 2008 seems to be one of those years when forces
combine.