Environmental Center | University of Colorado at Boulder
Welcome
Recycling
Greening The Campus
Transportation
Energy & Water
Earth Education
Events
Library
Publications
In The News
Get Involved
.smlink { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;}
web
people
Search
Center |
CU A to Z
Contact Us
About Us
Environmental Links
News from the CU Environmental Center March 2007
Chancellor Peterson: CU Will Lead on Sustainability |
Director's Corner: The Tipping Point |
Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit: A Look Back |
RecycleMania Update |
Know Someone Making a World of Difference on Campus? |
What's Happening: Upcoming Events |
Green Living Tip
Enjoy the monthly update from the CU Environmental Center. Please let us know if you have ideas, input, feedback or news.
Chancellor: CU Will Lead on Sustainability
(This editorial appeared originally in the Colorado Daily and the Boulder Daily Camera, respectively.)
Clearly, energy is at the forefront of the American consciousness. Whether it is in relation to events in the Middle East, the new energy economies being established across the American West, or the bold energy agenda announced by Gov. Ritter here in Colorado, there is a spirit of innovation and resolve overtaking the nation that we can and must achieve energy independence and environmental sustainability in this century.
That spirit is well-represented at the University of Colorado at Boulder. On Feb. 22 and 23, we hosted our annual Sustainability Summit, a two-day gathering that brings together higher education administrators, campus environmental leaders and energy experts from around the nation to discuss strategies and goals to create sustainability. Coinciding with this event, I am pleased to announce a series of additional measures that will advance CU-Boulder's position as a national leader in sustainability and renewable energy.
First, on behalf of CU-Boulder I have pledged to participate in the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which will solidify our goal of reducing Greenhouse Gas (or GHG) emissions. CU-Boulder will begin immediately, a detailed inventory of our current emissions; then, within two years, the campus will outline short- and long-term strategies for emission reductions to reach the PCC goal of "climate neutrality" — zero net GHG.
This is a bold challenge, but CU-Boulder has an excellent record to build upon. Today, the university purchases 10 percent of the campus's electricity from renewable sources, and we have reduced our electrical consumption by 13 percent per square foot since 2001. In addition, CU-Boulder has helped to generate 3.2 million rides per year on RTD buses through participation in RTD's Eco Pass program, created a recycling program that is diverting 1,600 tons from landfills annually and pioneered water-conservation programs that save over 110 million gallons annually on campus.
Most of all, our students are to be credited for their leadership in helping to make the recently completed ATLAS building at CU-Boulder the first public building in the state of Colorado to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold Certification — one of only seven buildings statewide to achieve such a designation.
With the need for a centralized heating and cooling facility to be built, we must take new and stronger measures to offset our purchase of electricity from sources that increase our carbon output. To assist in this process, I am pleased to announce that in the next fiscal year, we will begin investing $250,000 annually in projects to reduce campus energy consumption, particularly electrical consumption. At some point in the near future, we expect we may seek new funds or a reallocation of a portion of the $250,000 for renewable-energy production systems on campus properties or close to the campus.
I am also asking that investments beyond the $250,000 per year be considered for future funding as a pressing campus priority in order to aggressively pursue options for greatly reducing CU-Boulder's GHG emissions. To offset our carbon output in the meantime, our campus has committed to spending an additional $50,000 per year for the purchase of renewable wind energy.
Finally, I am pleased to announce the establishment of the Chancellor's Committee on Energy, Environment and Sustainability, a working group charged with setting sustainability goals for the campus.
Besides drawing from a cross-section of campus constituencies, this working group will mark a new sustainability partnership with the city of Boulder. Recognizing that CU's and Boulder's fortunes are tied together in moving toward sustainability and the use of renewable energy, I have requested that Boulder Mayor Mark Ruzzin and City Manager Frank Bruno appoint a city representative to serve as a permanent member of this committee.
Many more steps remain to be taken, but with the broad support of the entire cross-section of our campus community, CU-Boulder's nationally recognized Environmental Center, and the state, county and city governments, our sustainability future will burn bright and clean for many years to come, securing the University of Colorado at Boulder's reputation as a national environmental leader for a new generation.
Director's Corner: The Tipping Point
A wise local leader told me recently, “To err is human; to make a mid-course correction is intelligent.” And indeed, CU Boulder has initiated one of the most profound mid-course corrections ever. 2007 is only two months old—and what a ride it’s been!
In January, we were facing the prospect that the nation’s premier environmental research university (CU-Boulder) would be powered by coal-derived electricity for the foreseeable future. While the campus and community had offered broad support for a campus goal of carbon-neutrality in our landmark report, the 2006 Blueprint for a Green Campus, our ancient on-campus gas-fired power plant was teetering on the brink of physical and financial failure.
To keep campus lights on, CU’s administration was forced to turn to coal-derived electricity from Xcel. This was cheaper in the short term, but shot our carbon emissions up dramatically—and was unpopular with faculty, students, community leaders, local elected officials and the press. Rhetoric was heating up.
The administration was criticized for adding more carbon emissions in a community with robust carbon- reduction goals—and one that had just passed the nation’s first carbon tax. For their part, the administration felt boxed in by their fiduciary responsibility to keep the campus in the black while keeping the lights on. On each side, heels were digging in. Things were going badly.
This debate was beginning to feel very familiar. Many of us in the environmental community have struggled to create changed behaviors and mindsets our entire careers. We work everyday to find ways to stimulate people to recycle, eliminate waste, walk, ride a bike, take a bus, turn the lights off, print on both sides of a sheet of paper, conserve water, stop using pesticides, drive less/not and/or burn biodiesel/ethanol or other clean fuels, stop sprawling into our wild places and open spaces, leave critters alone, eliminate air pollution, help inner-city residents and low-income communities struggle against the pollution they are forced to live with, etc, etc.
We often see only incremental improvement in these issues, not wholesale change, and the overall trends can seem daunting and hopeless. And we often encounter significant resistance to our efforts. We focus on changing one life, one program, one small but meaningful note in the chorus of change. We hunker down.
Then, in an instant, everything’s possible. We’ve hit the tipping point. That’s what has happened at CU. In the space of two weeks, we went from battle stations to the Camp David Accords. Wow!
Chancellor Peterson announced CU has signed on to a national campaign to transition the campus to climate neutrality. He committed upwards of $250,000 in the first year to initiate these efforts. He pledged more funding in next year’s budget. He is appointing a high-level campus-wide task force to write an implementation plan to get us to climate neutrality. In a new show of town-gown partnership, Boulder’s mayor was invited to sit on the task force. Chancellor Peterson committed an additional $50,000 to buy more wind power instead of coal to power the campus.
Chancellor Peterson is not done: He met with his colleagues at CU-Denver and CU-Colorado Springs—and they have made the same commitment. CU is now the first statewide system in the nation to commit to climate neutrality. Chancellor Peterson invited over 100 college presidents and chancellors to CU to discuss this effort and tried to talk them into signing too. Some have. More will follow soon. Now he is personally reaching out to presidents at Washington, Minnesota, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (he was provost there), Texas A&M (his alma mater), and CSU. As of this writing, we’re at 111 colleges and universities whose presidents have committed their campuses to climate neutrality.
Chancellor Peterson has had a great effect on his staff, too. Vice Chancellor Paul Tabolt showed great leadership in bringing campus interests together behind a manifesto supporting climate neutrality that we all signed and sent to the chancellor. It detailed many technical, policy, and people issues that needed to be clarified in order to move forward together. Vice Chancellor Tabolt was also an integral part and participant in the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit (RMSS) last month. He’s coming up with new ideas and approaches to help jump start our transition to climate neutrality. He’s on the team. This builds upon the vice chancellor’s first energy goal from a few years past that the campus reduce its energy use by 5 percent annually per square foot of buildings.
So please excuse this gushing, probably too-long article, but we’ve waited years for this. And as a wise man once said, “There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” Indeed, we hit the tipping point, it seems.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point is about that “magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.” How does this happen?
Gladwell’s first principle is The Law of the Few that says, “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” These three types of people are: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.
Connectors are those people with an extraordinary ability to make friends and acquaintances. You know a few. Mavens are people who accumulate knowledge and are obsessed with knowing and understanding a particular product or market. No shortage of these in the environmental movement either. Then there are the Salesmen, who have “the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.” We listened to scores of these folks at RMSS.
The Law of the Few, then, says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of beginning epidemics, if only they can be found and linked together. Welcome to the environmental community.
The second principle is The Stickness Factor. Gladwell details that “there is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.” It seems that the line between acceptance and hostility toward a particular product or trend is often very narrow. We just saw that at CU.
Gladwell’s third principle is The Power of Context. This rule is premised on the understanding that epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur. And the recent exponential growth in climate-change awareness certainly helped set the table for CU’s reversal of fortune.
Still, it’s clear that the bulk of humanity isn’t tuned into climate change yet, even though some of us may think about it everyday. So, what else happened to create such a rapid turnabout in attitudes among CU campus leaders?
I think the answer is what Gladwell’s book underplays: leadership. In our case, that leader is Chancellor Bud Peterson.
Chancellor Peterson has not spent his career working first and foremost on sustainability and environmental issues. He comes to CU from the traditionally conservative approaches he was trained in as an engineer. And when we first started a conversation with him about sustainability concepts last year, we struggled to frame them in terms that lent themselves to an engineer’s decision-making approach.
But Chancellor Peterson didn’t arrive as leader of one on the nation’s best universities because he was good with a slide rule. He is a bigger person who is capable of re-evaluating old ways in light of new information, finding a better vision that brings people together, and has the professional and personal courage to change his mind.
It’s hard enough for any of us to change a belief or personal behavior. It’s harder when in a major leadership position because so many consequences flow from your decisions. The quote I cited in this article’s first sentence came from Chancellor Peterson. He’s an intelligent man.
Chancellor Peterson deserves our heartfelt thanks for stepping up, seizing the moment, and setting us to work on the most important task we can ever hope to contribute to: creating a sustainable future for our students, our community and our planet.
Thank you, sir. Now we’ll get back to work.
2007 Sustainability Summit: A Look Back
The CU Environmental Center would like to thank all of those who attended the 2007 Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit! The Summit was very successful in laying out the many issues that campuses can advance, the tools and strategies, as well as establishing useful networks. Responding to demand, we were very excited to expand the Colorado Sustainability Summit to the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit this year, which turned out to be a huge success with three times the number of participants, genuine enthusiasm, quality information, and anticipated outcomes.
Over two days, the Summit had 25 valuable sessions and workshops, plenary panels on "Campus Leadership for Climate Action” and “Elevating Sustainability in the Rocky Mountain Region”, inspiring keynotes with Senator Gary Hart, Bill Becker and Hunter Lovins, the Climate Leadership Summit, and a Green Products Expo. The Summit attracted over 650 participants, plus another 100 participants in the “Fostering Sustainable Behavior” pre-summit workshop on Feb. 21. These numbers include delegates from dozens of the Rocky Mountain region’s college and university campuses.
Dan Worth, who serves as executive director of the National Association of Environmental Law Societies, has captured the Summit’s highlights in a blog posted on several widely-read Web sites. We invite you to follow either of the two links below to experience (or re-experience) the events that made the 2007 Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit such a resounding success.
Huffington Post
Grist
RecycleMania Update
After four weeks, CU ranks among top 30 schools
It's the fourth week of RecycleMania and CU stands in 27th place. That's pretty good if you take into account the 201 other schools participating in this year's 10- week waste reduction competition. Still, the Recycling Team knows we could be recycling more, and is working hard help CU earn a place among the nation's top 10 best recycling schools.
Currently 28.6 percent of our overall waste is recycled; yet it is possible to be diverting at least 55 percent of our waste from the landfill, as demonstrated by the leading school, Rutgers University in New Jersey. To that end, the Recycling Outreach Team is working to educate the campus community. Programs created for students, faculty and staff are designed to create awareness in academic and administrative buildings, as well as in residence halls.
To reach the students, the team has sprinkled recycling reminders everywhere on campus, from chalkboards and bulletin boards to the garbage cans themselves. Through artistic flyers, displays and chalkings, students are encouraged to recycle, not only as a way to help CU win RecycleMania, but also to conserve energy and natural resources in addition to saving CU money.
Students are also encouraged to enter the "Catch the Mania" contest in which they’re presented with a bi- weekly recycling-related question. The most creative response wins a gift certificate to a supportive local business. Sophomore Mark Arnoldy won the first round with his answer to the question, "What motivates you to recycle?" He answered, "We as humans are so short-sighted in our ability to show love and compassion for people we do not see- especially those of future generations. Recycling is an easy way to do so." This truly insightful answer really speaks to why we recycle – we do it so those who will come after us have an equally magnificent planet to live on (find this round’s question below).
To reach students living on campus, recycling staff and volunteers go door-to-door throughout the residence halls collecting students’ recyclables and encouraging them to continue doing their part to reduce CU's environmental impact. To inspire the students’ participation, CU Recycling will host a party for the residence hall that has the highest overall diversion rate at the end of RecycleMania. Resident Advisors are helping to support individual residents in each hall to recycle by taking part in a variety of activities suggested by CU Recycling’s “How to Win RecycleMania” guide. So far, over the past four weeks, the average resident has recycled eight and a half pounds in their hall; the Recycling Outreach Team's goal is for the average resident to double the amount of waste they recycle over the next six weeks.
In other campus buildings, staff and faculty are invited to participate in office presentations from CU Recycling staff that help resolve recycling-related questions and motivate office employees to increase their building's diversion rate. Building proctors are encouraged to post Environmental Impact Reports for their building, to keep present the notion that recycling really does help conserve resources such as water, energy, trees and landfill space, and that one building can make a substantial difference.
There continue to be many volunteer opportunities for RecycleMania including tabling, button or banner making, postering and more. Volunteers can also participate by helping the staff go door-to-door in residence halls. To get involved, stop by the Environmental Center in UMC 355, check out the website at http://recycling.colorado.edu/rm07/ or call 303-492-8307.
Someone Making a World of Difference?
Nominate Them for a Campus Environmental Award
The University of Colorado Environmental Center is currently accepting nominations for outstanding individuals and departments who exceed expectations and demonstrate a sincere commitment to reducing the burden that CU-Boulder places on the environment. The Environmental Center wishes to recognize these outstanding individuals and departments at an environmental awards ceremony on April 20.
Please give some thought to who may be deserving of such an award and submit a nomination by March 16. Nominees must be a department or individual currently or formerly located on the University of Colorado-Boulder campus.
To nominate, click here and fill out a short nomination form.
What's Happening: Upcoming Events
March 8-11 - Ice Fest, various times and locations, CU-Boulder
-
March 14 - Bike Bash - 10:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m., Fine Arts Lawn, CU-Boulder
-
March 15 - Recycling X-Games - 10:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m., UMC Fountain, CU-Boulder
-
March 16-17 - The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock, various times, Wolf Law Building, CU-Boulder
-
April 3 - Monthly Bioneers Screening - 7:00 p.m., Humanities 135, CU-Boulder
To view the complete events calendar, click here.
Green Living Tips for Stopping Junk Mail
Junk mail is more than simply annoying – it also uses valuable natural resources like trees, water, and energy.
According to ForestEthics, the Boreal Forest provides 20 percent of the world’s paper. Paper is the single largest component of our land fills; the paper industry is the third largest industrial energy consumer worldwide; companies produce a million catalogs a day made from Canada’s old growth Boreal Forest. If the catalog industry (which uses 3.6 tons of paper a year) just increased the amount of recycled paper they used to 10 percent post- consumer recycled content, it would save enough wood to build a six-foot fence stretching seven times across the United States every year. We would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over half a million tons. It would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road every year. Ten percent! We are still today making catalogs and newspapers and office paper out of what’s left of our wild places.
-Excerpted from Tzeporah Berman’s speech to Bioneers, 2006.
Give your postman a lighter load to carry this year and take a step toward conservation.... Eliminate your catalog clutter. The following sites offer several options to help cut down on unwanted junk mail.
(source: idealbite.com)
Catch the Mania!
Answer this question for a chance to win dinner on the Hill. This round's winner will receive a $25 dinner at The Burnt Toast and a $10 gift certificate to Abo's Pizza. This round ends Friday, so answer soon and check back every two weeks for another chance to win.
What habit can you change to create the most significant decrease in the waste you produce?
To answer, click here for the Catch the Mania entry form.
Enjoy the monthly update from the CU Environmental Center. Please let us know if you have ideas, input, feedback or news.
Contact the CU Environmental Center
email:
ecenter@colorado.edu phone:
303-492-8308
web:
http://ecenter.colorado.edu
Join our mailing list!
