Day two of the Butte annual sustainability conference opened with a special keynote featuring Ken Grossman, Owner and President of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company – a very popular company with the Butte crowd! Grossman, an alumni of Butte, gave an impressive overview of all the sustainability practices in place at the Brewery, such as the recycling or reusing of almost all waste (99% of waste is diverted from the landfill), using motion sensor lights throughout the buildings, a 10,000 plus panel (solar) structure, and a cattle partnership with Chico State University where the cows are fed spent grain, spent yeast, and even spent beer from the brewing process. The Brewery also captures CO₂ emissions, compressing and cleaning them and using the carbon dioxide as fuel in the dispensing process. Sierra Nevada also has two sustainability coordinators to monitor practices and look for new opportunities.

A second presentation by Dr. Randal Beeman from Bakersfield College, a professor of history, talked about the role of the government in sustainability in history. Dr. Beeman highlighted a couple of ecological crises from the past – the dust bowl and the flooding of the Mississippi and Tennessee river valley in the 30’s. He says the U.S. has always reacted to crisis, instead of preparing for a crisis. The message? Let’s prepare for the warming climate by building a sustainable society –- sustainable homes, campuses and communities with sustainable practices. He emphasized that sustainability, specifically sustainable agriculture, needs to sustain both people and the land and support their regeneration.

Yvonne Christopher, faculty member for construction inspection at Butte College, shared her plans for a 12-building scenario village that will break ground this fall. This village will be built with green features and used for training purposes for local fireman and police, as well as Butte students interested in green building careers and construction.

Butte currently offers courses in energy efficiency and renewable energy, green building technologies and practices, and a green building and LEED certification course.

Kristy Jones is reporting from the 3rd Annual Butte College Sustainability Conference, in Oroville, California.

Every spring we see a rash of stories on end-of-the-semester cleanouts in dorms and student apartments. As students leave for the summer, dumpsters fill up with perfectly good lamps, textbooks, furniture and clothing. However, schools are trying to make the mass exodus from campus less like a dump and more like a treasure hunt by creating student reuse depots, rescuing items from landfills, and donating useful materials to shelters and thrift stores. Here are a few:

• Mills College, in Oakland, CA, set up a Reuse Depot in Reinhardt Hall, re-purposing concrete slabs and wooden shelves from the city landfill to hold all the stuff donated by students. "Shoppers" can choose from canned food, textbooks, clothing, binders, purses, gardening tools and more. Students from the school's environmental club run the Depot during the semester, and coordinate a  drop-off to local charities at the end of the semester. 
• Suffolk University makes it easy with a Dump-and-Run program, which saves the university money that it would otherwise spend on trash-hauling. Donated materials are given to local organizations for the homeless and the hungry. In the spring of 2008, the program diverted 5,500 lbs worth of items. 
• Arizona State makes an event out of ditching the dumpster, with games, de-stressing activities, music and prizes. Last year they collected more than 10,000 lbs worth of materials, and also accept items that are hard to recycle, such as electronics and toner cartridges. 
• Hamilton College has an annual Ham's Cram-and-Scram which takes back unopened food and other goods from students and donates most of them to local shelters and consignment stores. Paper and other materials are typically recycled, and reusable items like furniture are kept to be resold to students at the beginning of the next fall semester. 
• NYU's Sustainability Task Force runs Green Apple Move Out, which collects and donates discarded items from dorms and the law school, and hopes to encompass every dormitory on the campus in the next five years.

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 quick scan through your house reveals a few truths about the energy costs of your appliances. In many homes, the most constant energy drain comes from the direction of the kitchen, where the fridge is on all the time, and gas ranges, toasters, mixers, blenders and waffle-makers await the flip of a switch. And that's before we talk about the carbon emissions inherent in the food itself!

On the commercial scale, this energy cost multiplies exponentially, as restaurants and cafeterias operate at peak output for sometimes 18 hours a day or more. A single commercial refrigerator may require as much energy as an entire household, and according to the Green Restaurants Association, professional kitchens use five times more electricity than other commercial industries, such as lodging or retail.

So, to address the carbon costs of food preparation, Kendall College has teamed up with the Green Restaurants Association to work towards greener, more energy-efficient food preparation. Kendall College, based in Chicago, is the first culinary school to operate a certified green restaurant, and has two on campus.

As part of their outreach efforts, Kendall and the Green Restaurant Association have produced "Sustainability for the Foodservice Industry," a short video which highlights steps that commercial and campus kitchens can take to be more environmentally responsible and save costs. Kendall has made the usual switches, such as CFL lighting, Energy Star appliances, and composting food waste, and is also experimenting with policies that affect diner's choices, such as only serving water upon request, which could potentially save millions of gallons of water per year.

To learn more, check out the free video here.

Image: FreeFoto.com

Recyclemania, a light-hearted, friendly competition between campuses, aims to reduce waste and raise awareness. Over a 10-week period, colleges and universities compete in different contests to see which institution can collect the highest amount of recyclables per capita, the largest total amount of recyclables, the smallest amount of trash, and/or earn the highest recycling rate. There are also categories for individual waste products, such as paper, food products and cans. Four hundred schools participated this year across sixteen divisions, and results have just been announced.

Kalamazoo College of Michigan took first-place honors in both the Grand Champion (highest recycling rate) and Per-Capita categories, with a cumulative recycling rate of 58.93% and 75.22 lbs recycled per person over the length of the challenge. The Gorilla Prize, which awards the highest number of pounds, went to Stanford for recycling 1,231,012 lbs of waste in ten weeks. North Lake College of Irving, Texas, won the Waste Minimization prize for producing a scant 12.53 pounds of unrecycled waste per capita.

To see the rest of the awards, check Recyclemania's site here.  In total, these schools recycled 58.6 million pounds, which not only lessens the load on landfills, but also helps to minimize the impact that industry has on the environment. Many of these products, such as paper and cardboard, which would emit methane if left to degrade in a landfill, also lower carbon emissions when recycled. Congratulations to the schools involved! If you didn't participate this year, click around www.recyclemaniacs.org for ideas and consider competing next year.

Part of what makes campuses so energy-intensive is the fact that a lot more goes on than classes. Many students reside in dorms, which means they spend the majority of their day working, eating, studying, playing and sleeping on campus. Faculty and administrators (as well as off-campus students) often work long hours, and use university resources like cafeterias or bookstores before commuting home at the end of the day. Colleges must provide all kinds of amenities to their populations, and today we want to focus on a big one: the food.

While some campuses are small enough to source all their food locally, or even grow it on campus (like the organic, vegetarian meals provided by Maharishi University), for most this is impossible or unfeasible. Ohio University recently took a different approach by conducting an audit of wasted cafeteria food. This easily-measured study took place over four days in January and February, and averaged the amount of waste by dividing the amount of edible food thrown away (not including scraps like banana peels or bones) by the number of people who dined during the day.

What did the results show? On average, 5.4 ounces of edible food were thrown away per person.  On January 21st, when 248 pounds of waste were discarded by the 756 people who were served, 330 additional people could have been fed.

The University's Office of Sustainability, which conducted the study, decided to test for a few more variables. On the third audit, February 4th, all trays were removed from the cafeteria. Students could still eat as much as they wanted, but had to make more trips to load up their plates. The amount of food wasted dropped to 4.5 ounces per person. On the final audit day, February 18th, signs and charts displaying the results of the first three tests were scattered around the cafeteria in the hope that they might provoke a further decrease in food waste, even though trays were once again available. An average of 5.56 ounces per person was discarded.

What we find most interesting is the fact that education seemed to have a significantly smaller impact than the removal of the dining trays. Given the immense amount of energy  (and the financial cost to diners and the university) that goes into producing, packaging, transporting and preparing food, small changes in eating habits can make big differences in efficiency, without requiring that students give up any of that much-needed brain food!

What do you think? Should the trays be removed entirely? Or is it better to step up educational efforts and expect diners to monitor themselves? Has your campus done similar audits or had success with other strategies for managing food?

Photo credit to Flickr Suviko

Recycling is great for the environment, but what has it got to do with climate change?

Solid waste disposal is a huge generator of greenhouse gases. Trash has to be hauled away, and there are emissions released from the transportation. Carbon dioxide is emitted when waste is incinerated, and methane is released when waste is put into landfills. According to the EPA, landfills are the largest source of methane emissions (CH₄), producing 25% of all methane emissions in the United States.

When recycling, not only is there a decrease in the amount of solid waste but there is also a decrease in energy needed to make, distribute and dispose of these products. When energy use decreases, the burning of fossil fuels also decreases, therefore emitting fewer greenhouse gases. Less virgin materials are extracted, therefore protecting our natural resources. According to the EPA, in 1996 the United States recycled solid waste that prevented the release of 33 million tons of carbon—approximately the amount emitted by 25 million cars annually!!

Think about paper recycling—there is less of a need for virgin materials, in this case trees. By keeping more trees standing, carbon sequestration is increased, again reducing the carbon dioxide emitted. It is important as consumers to complete the cycle full circle, by not only recycling, but buying recycled products. Without a market for recycled products, recycling does not do anyone much good. The more consumers demand recycled products, the more they will become available!

According to an analysis of NWF Campus Ecology team members over that last five years, waste reduction, such as recycling and composting, ranked the most popular sustainability practice implemented on campus. The Berkshire School in Massachusetts doubled the tonnage of recycled products in one-year, with their student-led recycling program! Ashland University in Ohio actually went through bags of trash (talk about dedication!) to learn that 70% of the university’s trash was actually recyclable! Check out our Waste Reduction page to learn about MANY more schools that are involved in waste reduction projects on campus!