This may only happen once, but we've scooped the New York Times. Today's article on trayless dining at universities is good, but nothing earth-shattering if you read ours (Students Have Their Hands Full Saving Food, Energy and Water) in the fall.

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

A new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (sub. req.) profiles a minority trend that could, if economic conditions persist, become a majority problem.

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.

As part 2 of last week's post on college sustainability rankings, here's a little more information on the Sustainable Endowment Institute's newly issued Green Report Card.

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 by The 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.