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

As a warm-up to this year's AASHE conference, I toured Duke University with a group of other sustainability professionals, starting with the swamp.

I imagine most campus visitors don't immediately get dragged out into the marsh, but the interest on everyone's faces was a visible reminder that schools aren't just invested in clean energy, but also in traditional environmental work, such as restoring wetlands. This is particularly true when projects involve students in the process.

The SWAMP (Stream and Wetland Assessment Management Park) project is designed to restore an urban watershed, research several different kinds of wetlands, and purify local water supplies. The work was largely funded by the state of North Carolina because of its positive impact on downstream water quality, with a smaller contribution from the university itself. Students are trained on "real-world restoration techniques, modern hydrologic modeling, and the basic principles of stream, lake, and wetland ecology" as part of their coursework, and they came on the tour with us to answer questions and tell us about the work they've done.

As part of the tour, we also looked at several LEED-Silver campus buildings, counted bike racks, toured a prototype "smart house," and ate a meal of local food from one of the campus cafes. However, for many people the most memorable part of the day was the morning walk through the woods. One attendee remarked, "I love that students are out here doing the work. That happens at a lot of universities, but not enough. Maybe it needs to be more than just the natural science students."

The idea that students and others on campus need to connect better to their surroundings was a common theme of the conference. Between sessions on eco-literacy, local environmental history projects, campus habitats, and Vandana Shiva's appeal to get people back on the land, almost everybody had something to say.

After Janice Crede started taking small groups of students out to a cabin for a week (no laptops or TVs allowed) for a "Nature Immersion" curriculum she piloted at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, she started seeing results. "We wanted to help students understand a little bit more about their impact on the planet. They have a half-hour biology class each day, then we let them loose to explore the lake, the woods, the bog, before we have some conversations about sustainability and leadership. Everything is outside. We eat dinner by the campfire and stay up too late, and by the end of the week they no longer miss their laptops, and they don’t want to leave."

Surveys and open-ended writing assignments that the students complete before and after the course corroborate Crede's thesis: "What they told me is that they come back and they feel changed in their attitudes, perceptions and behaviors. They feel as if they have a whole new group of people they can relate to."   

We are recapping AASHE: Sustainability on Campus and Beyond as it happens. If you were at the sessions we're covering, weigh in with your comments below. Or see others' blogs, photos and Twitter updates on the AASHE live page.

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

Being part of National Wildlife Federation, those of us at Campus Ecology talk a lot about wildlife habitats. Not only are we invested in maintaining biological diversity and preserving the migration paths of plants, birds, butterflies and animals, we also know that creating spaces for wildlife means that we are providing natural carbon sequestration opportunities.

We recently hosted a teleconference on campus habitat restoration (available here) and learned about some great things that schools have been doing to green their campuses through the use of habitat. The University of Central Florida, for example, focused their efforts on education by creating several distinct ecosystems in the UCF arboretum that replicate habitats exclusive to central Florida. The 12-acre biogeographic garden is crisscrossed with trails for students and visitors. The university has also started a temperature tracking system on campus to explore the "urban heat island effect." Native vegetation will be planted on roofs and in hot spots, and then temperature will be tracked again. Staff hope to see significant cooling in certain areas.

Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois, took a different approach by restoring habitat that had already been damaged.  Oakton's acres of habitat had been overrun with buckthorn and a Eurasian garlic mustard plant which crowded out native species and plants. With a grant from BP and a lot of help from student volunteers, these plants are slowly being eradicated to make room for seeds from local (within a 25-mile radius) northeastern Illinois. Once these take hold, the ecosystem can return to its natural state and attract pollinating insects and other wildlife. Oakton also uses controlled burns, as local species are adapted to fire and will survive, while invasive plants often won't.

An even bigger project is currently taking place at The University of Washington Bothell Cascadia Community College, where staffers looked at a dilapidated section of the North Creek floodplain on campus lands, and embarked on a decades-long restoration to manage watersheds and coax the forest back to life. (Look here for more details.) The ongoing restoration acts as a valuable case study to students, while it also attracts good press to the school as one of the biggest floodplain restorations in the Pacific Northwest.

It can sometimes be difficult to convince other campus decision-makers that habitat restoration is important and effective. It took several years to formulate the plan and gain permits for the wetlands restoration project at UWB/CCC, and even though progress is being made, it takes several decades for an ecosystem to reach maturity. Many of the people who contributed to the project may never see this part of North Creek functioning in its full glory. Also, seeing energy costs go down due to increased efficiency is, to many people, more satisfying than knowing that green space is sequestering carbon. This means some campuses are more willing to retrofit buildings than create habitats. Both are important, but we think that the Wildflower loop at UCF's aboretum is good evidence that habitats are important for well-being, not just carbon capture.

Check out our podcast and powerpoint of the web conference if you want to get more details on these projects. You can also contact us for more research and examples if you're interested in implementing this kind of project on your own campus. To start small, consider dedicating a small section of your campus as a Certified Wildlife Habitat. And for extra credit, check to see if Fritz Haeg's Animal Estates exhibit is coming to your town. This traveling installation reintroduces animals into environments such as strip malls, garages, office parks, freeways, front yards and parking lots to examine the displacement of wildlife by humans and bring species back into harmony. 

Several posts over at the Buildings & Grounds blog have caught our eye recently for their focus on environmental initiatives on campus. Part of The Chronicle of Higher Education's site, this frequently-updated blog covers architecture, design, new technologies and construction, landscaping, and of course, sustainability.  (Full disclosure: I was May's guest blogger, so a couple of these posts are from me.) Check them out below:

Organic Gardening at Furman University : James Wilkins, sustainability coordinator at Furman, guides the Chronicle through a small garden designed to teach students about sustainable agriculture.

Conserving Water at Emory University: Emory's new rainwater collecting system is controversial enough that city planners have required that the water be dyed blue.

Tweaking Won't Assure Sustainability, But Reimagining Might: One of my guest posts takes a closer look at ASU's Biodesign Institute.

Education Is the Ultimate Carbon-Neutral Solution: This post from Clean Air--Cool Planet's Anne Stephenson examines the role of universities in creating aware, environmentally-educated citizens.

Save Energy or the Bear Gets It: A student project at Dartmouth encourages energy conservation with a real-time monitor of electricity usage in the dorms. Residents team up to keep the bear off "thin ice!"

Should a Liberal Education Include an Agricultural Education?: Teaching students about agriculture is another way to teach them about the world and their unique place in it.

Time to Roll Up Our Sleeves: My final post addresses the nature of symbols within the environmental movement, and a new way of thinking about sustainability.

This underwhelming waterway is known as Kraut Creek to residents of Boone, NC, who remember the days when a local sauerkraut factory sent its runoff downstream, polluting air and water alike. Now that the factory is long gone, a group of professors, students, engineers and local environmentalists who are inspired by the creek's potential have teamed up to restore a 150-foot stretch of the stream to its former glory.

“When the project is completely finished, it’s going to be beautiful,” says Jana Carp, pictured at left. “We have a landscaping plan that will filter storm water runoff, stabilize the banks and incorporate native plants and shrubs that will shade the creek and provide a better habitat for fish, amphibians and birds.”

While the scope of the project is small, the Committee hopes that their work, in partnership with local organizations such as the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce, MountainKeepers, and the National Committee for the New River, will inspire other property owners along the stream banks to embark on similar projects.

The restoration is expected to take about four weeks to complete, although it will take much longer to see the return of wildlife and measure differences in water quality. For more information, click here.

Image: Members of the Kraut Creek Committee on the damaged banks. Photo taken by Marie Freeman, via Appalachian State University News.

Today's New York Times profiled the SEED house at environmental all-star Oberlin College. SEED stands for Student Experiment in Ecological Design, and unites eight students in a practical laboratory of sustainable living.

As these students have learned more about the technological and environmental challenges they and their communities will face, they have been motivated to test drive environmental stewardship. Living in a house retrofitted to save energy and conserve water, the students also compost, compete for the shortest shower, study in the same room, and unplug their appliances. Striking a balance between one-time switches and ongoing habit changes, these students have weather-stripped the house and perfected a system for collecting extra shower water in buckets.

Lucas Brown, one of the founding students of the house, notes in a video interview that "Our main goals are to spread ecological living practices. Our first and primary goal is outreach. If the actions of this house end with us, we see that as a failure. Our second goal, which is just as important, is to reduce our ecological footprint here on-site. To know our impact on the world and make sure it's a positive one." Outreach efforts by the students include offering to switch out incandescent bulbs for CFLs in their neighbors' homes, and talking about the changes they're making to friends and guests in the house.
 

Hillsborough Community College is going for gold: Gold LEED, that is, at a new campus in Tampa Bay's SouthShore community. Constructed with recycled steel, outfitted with efficient daylight-monitoring lights, and bordered by a lagoon to collect rainwater for irrigation and plumbing, the small campus is expected to save 80% of its water costs and about $156,000 on lighting and utility bills. While certification is still under review, the college is confident that the buildings will qualify, as they were designed and built around the Gold guidelines. The three buildings will house classrooms, administrative offices, a nursing lab and a student union center when they open this summer.

Even better, HCC's President Gwendolyn Stephenson has committed to aligning every new construction or renovation project with U.S. Green Building Council guidelines, including an additional three buildings for the SouthShore campus. She says, "Colleges have to be thoughtful stewards of our planet's natural resources. We have a role in educating the public. I think we have to be role models." 

Most universities that are developing climate teams and renewable energy task forces are doing so in the name of prevention: preventing future over-dependence on fossil fuel reserves, creating their own power/heating sources to prevent blackouts, reusing as much waste material as possible to reduce the future need for landfills, etc.

However, some campuses are finding that prevention is a pipe dream when you are in desperate need of a cure. I'm referring, of course, to the need for water, which is already straining some campus budgets and local water sources. Built like miniature cities, universities and colleges require an immense amount of water for dorms, cafeterias, buildings, landscaping and research. Even off-campus, the need for housing, retail and transportation for students and staff means that city centers grow around the university and further increase demands on local water plants. As campuses grow to provide better education for more students, the situation can become precarious, particularly when weather changes.

Recent drought in areas like the Carolinas and Georgia is forcing water conservation changes in a hurry. The University of Georgia enacted a wide range of measures last year to combat the water shortage, such as low-flow plumbing, eliminating automatic flush mechanisms, consolidating and hand-watering greenhouse plants, and recirculating cooling water. Between July and September of 2007, UGA's estimated savings was about 16.5 million gallons.

UGA's example is a good one; while most measures were enacted in an emergency drought situation,  some were previous policy that made the campus more water-efficient year-round. Here are a few suggestions for you and your campus, whether or not you are facing a water shortage.

What you can do:

Shorten your showers by 5 minutes or so, and turn off the faucet while brushing your teeth and washing your face. It's also important to talk to your administrators about water usage on campus. Taking a Navy-style shower is all well and good, but if no one else will, your impact is negligible. So talk to your fellow students and coworkers about taking shorter showers as well, and tell the university that you are doing so out of concern for a natural resource that you want to keep clean and abundant. Many colleges think of their students as consumers, and you should use that to your advantage. Faculty and staffers can volunteer their time to help the university run water audits and campaigns.

What your campus can do:

Do a detailed audit of the water usage on your campus. Are the landscaping plants native to your area (and therefore less likely to need large amounts of water)? Could low-flow/aerated plumbing fixtures be installed? Where does your waste water go, and could any of it be reused, perhaps in the aforementioned landscaping? Where can water usage be reduced without compromising quality of life or efficient operating procedures?

Talk to your local water plants to find out if your water sources are sustainable. How is the water cleaned and processed, and how much is lost? Ask if they are involved in the Water Utility Climate Alliance, which is researching the effect of climate change on American water supplies.