Krysta Yousoufian is serious
about her commitment to the
environment. This is why the 19-year-old University of Washington sophomore
turns off her lights and unplugs her
computer monitor every morning before
she leaves her dorm room, and uses the
computer labs whenever possible, even
though her mother has offered to buy her
a new, more energy-efficient LCD monitor.
(It would be wasteful, she says, to get
rid of her old one.) That is why she volunteered
last year to help feed the university’s
worm bins at the school’s urban farm.
And why she has spent time educating
new students about the university’s aggressive
recycling and composting program,
and why she religiously saves her apple
cores and other food scraps to contribute
to it, even though it sometimes means
keeping them in her dorm room overnight.
“I think my friends think I’m a little bit
crazy,” Yousoufian admitted. Perhaps. But
Yousoufian, a computer science major and
Seattle native who is also the webmaster
for SEED (Students Expressing Environmental
Dedication), a volunteer student
group that works to promote sustainability
in residence halls and dining operations,
is hardly alone in her desire to make
the University of Washington a more ecofriendly
place. And it is not just her fellow
SEED members who share her enthusiasm.
From the president to the janitors,
many of the university’s faculty and staff
are devoting time and energy to what
Michael Meyering, who has been at the
forefront of the university dining halls’
“zero waste” campaign, describes as “a noble
cause.”
It is part of a nationwide movement
among institutions of higher education to
improve their environmental stewardship
and focus on sustainability, a movement
that the University of Washington is helping
to lead.
In part, that is because it’s the smart
thing to do: In the long run, going green
saves money—and in the case of wise investments,
can even make money. Sustainable
practices also promote better
health, less absenteeism and more productivity.
And they attract students, who are
paying increasing attention to schools’ environmental
policies. (In a nod to the latter
development, The Princeton Review,
which rates institutions of higher education
on selectivity, quality of life and other aspects
of interest to prospective students,
this year began issuing “green ratings,”
too; the University of Washington was one
of 11 schools that earned a top grade.) But
beyond being the smart thing to do,
University of Washington administrators
say repeatedly, with an earnestness familiar
to anyone who has visited the Pacific
Northwest, it’s the right thing to do.
“This is a place where people spend a
fair amount of time worrying about what
the right thing to do is. And we actually act
on it,” said UW President Mark Emmert.
“It’s an important part of our identity as a
university.”
Indeed, environmental stewardship is
an inescapable fact of life here—and not
just in the academic and research arenas,
although it is there, too: Dozens of UW-affiliated
faculty and researchers shared in
the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work
on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change; this year the university’s
College of Architecture and Urban
Planning created a professorship in sustainability;
and the university recently announced
a new College of the Environment,
which will encourage students interested
in environmental science, policy and
management to study across disciplines.
But even students whose academic focus
has nothing to do with the environment
can’t miss the lessons at work on the
700-acre Seattle campus.
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University of Washington President
Mark Emmert believes the university
must “act as a positive force for
enhancement of the local and global
environment.”
(Photo by Doug Wilson, Black Star, for CrossTalk)
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The dining halls serve local produce—
some of it grown in a rooftop garden—in
compostable take-out packaging, with
compostable cutlery; in the past year, more
than 500 tons of waste has been diverted
away from landfill and into compost,
thanks in part to signs posted in the dining
halls exhorting people to “Strive for Zero
Waste.” A robust recycling program boasts
a 40 percent participation rate, which last
year saved the university some $200,000 in
landfill fees it avoided; the university escaped
further landfill fees (and earned
$500,000) by selling used and outdated furniture
and equipment at its surplus store.
The custodial staff uses green cleaning supplies;
Procurement Services buys local office
products when possible, and requires
vendors to provide information about their
internal sustainability efforts.
The university’s U-Pass program (short
for “Universal Pass”) heavily subsidizes
public transportation for students, faculty
and staff; that and other measures designed
to discourage them from commuting
by car have resulted in a 16 percent decrease
in the number of vehicles coming to
campus over the past 17 years, despite a 24
percent increase in the campus population.
A capital projects sustainability manager
ensures that, in accordance with
Washington state law, all new state-funded
buildings and major renovations are at
least LEED silver-certified. (LEED, which
stands for Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design, is a nationally accepted
program administered by the U.S.
Green Building Council; silver is the second
level of four possible certifications.)
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Sophomore computer science major Krysta Yousoufian, shown working on the
University of Washington’s urban farm, is an enthusiastic participant in campus
efforts to improve the environment.
(Photo by Doug Wilson, Black Star, for CrossTalk)
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The school uses a natural-gas fired
steam plant to heat its buildings, has upgraded
most of its lighting systems to be
more energy efficient, and its electricity
purchases are from 100 percent renewable
energy (not difficult to do in Seattle, where
almost all electricity is generated from hydropower).
Since 2001, it has cut water usage
by 35 percent. It invests in renewable
energy funds and energy conscious real estate
funds. And an Environmental
Stewardship Advisory Committee, made
up of students, faculty and staff from the
university’s three campuses, reports to the
provost and executive vice president with
recommendations about how the institution
can improve its environmental practices.
There are also grass-roots efforts at
work. A group of staff from the university’s
Office of Strategy Management and the financial
and treasury departments has volunteered
to train their peers about “greening”
their office practices; suggestions include
setting printing margins wide and
printing double-sided documents; buying
in bulk to reduce packaging; and turning
off electrical equipment at the end of the
day.
Students, faculty and staff collaboratively
tend an urban farm on campus
alongside a pedestrian/bike trail. University
gardener Keith Possee, explaining why
he co-founded the urban farm, said, “If
we’re promoting sustainability, and we
have all this land on campus that’s not being
used, why shouldn’t we grow food on
it?” This past spring, SEED, the student
group, started a garden, too, doling out ten
individual plots to students living in residence
halls. Interest far outweighed the
number of plots available.
All of which pleases President
Emmert, who shortly after taking office in
2004 formally adopted an environmental
policy stating that as the state’s preeminent
research institution, the university has a responsibility
“to act as a positive force for
the enhancement of the local and global
environment.”
Since then, Emmert has continued to
ramp up the university’s public commitment
to the cause. In 2006, the university
became a founding partner of the Seattle
Climate Partnership, a voluntary pact
among Seattle area employers to reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions so that the
Seattle community can lower its overall
emissions to seven percent below 1990 levels
by 2012. Last year, Emmert became a
charter signatory of the American College
& University Presidents Climate
Commitment, which pledges institutions to
move toward carbon neutrality. The university
has already inventoried its carbon
emissions, and is in the process of developing
a climate action plan. The university recently
established an Office of Environmental
Stewardship to encourage and
coordinate the university’s efforts, although
budget constraints and the gloomy economic
picture have thus far prevented it
from being funded.
Why make environmental stewardship
a top priority? With nearly 39,000 students,
and an additional 27,600 faculty and staff,
“we have a large footprint in Seattle,” said
Emmert. “It’s incumbent on all large organizations
these days to do what they can to
be good corporate citizens.”
As an educational and research enterprise,
the university is already addressing
questions of environmental degradation
and climate change, Emmert said. “And if
we’re going to be leaders in the classroom
and the laboratory, it only makes sense that
we try to be leaders in practice,” he said.
“It’s in many ways a perfect teachable moment.”
It is also an easy sell. Known as the
“Emerald City” because of its lush landscape,
Seattle has a long history of conservation,
which is reflected in the people who
attend and work at the University of
Washington. “One of the intangible assets
at the University of Washington is the dedication
of the staff, students and faculty to
environmental stewardship and sustainability,”
said AJ Van Wallendael, who has
served as the university’s part-time environmental
stewardship coordinator since
the position was created in 2005. “There’s
just a passion for it on campus. It’s inherent
in the culture.”
That has not gone unnoticed. The university
has received numerous accolades
for its efforts. This fall, for the second year
in a row, UW received an A-, the highest
grade given, in the Sustainable Endowments
Institute’s latest College Sustainability
Report Card—one of just six public
institutions out of 300 colleges and universities
surveyed in the U.S. and Canada that
did. (Nine private schools also achieved the
top grade.)
To do so, a school had to be a leader in
all nine categories that the Institute looked
at, which included administrative commitment,
food and recycling, climate change,
green building, student involvement, transportation
and investment policies. “It’s important
for us to be researching this and
holding colleges and universities accountable
for their actions, because they do control
a lot of resources,” said Lea Lupkin, a
research fellow at the Sustainable
Endowments Institute, a non-profit organization.
Not only do schools have the ability
to influence vendors and students through
their practices, they can also leverage their
endowments to invest in green companies,
she said.
But those involved with the University
of Washington’s efforts are quick to point
out that long before organizations were issuing
“green” report cards or ratings, the
school had been taking important steps.
“Sustainability, now that we’ve coined a
term for it, has always been a priority for
the university,” said John Chapman, executive
director of engineering and operations,
who has been at the university for 23 years.
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Tracey MacRae, executive chef for a popular University of Washington dining hall,
uses locally grown, organic and natural foods as much as possible.
(Photo by Doug Wilson, Black Star, for CrossTalk)
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Twenty years ago, for instance,
Chapman convinced the university to
switch its coal-fired steam plant over to
natural gas, even though coal was less expensive.
“The argument was, ‘What business
do we have burning coal in an urban
environment?’” recalled Chapman, who
ran the plant at the time. Although carbon
dioxide emissions were not on anyone’s
radar back then—the university was instead
concerned about other pollutants—
the result was a 50 percent drop in greenhouse
gas emissions from the power plant,
Chapman said.
And that was just the beginning.
In 1995, the university entered into a
$10 million cost-sharing agreement
with its public-owned
utility, Seattle City Light, that
allowed it to upgrade much of
the building lighting with highefficiency
florescent lighting
systems. More recently, the
university has been trying to
do the same with so-called
“task lighting” such as desk
lamps and equipment lighting.
Thanks to a rebate agreement
with Seattle City Light
(Seattle’s publicly owned electric
power utility), students,
faculty and staff can trade in
incandescent bulbs used on
campus and get a compact fluorescent
light bulb for free; the
rebate winds up covering the
university’s costs.
The program has been a
huge success: Housing and
Food Services, as well as the
university’s fraternities and
sororities, have changed out
thousands of bulbs. Not only
are the new compact fluorescent bulbs four
times more efficient in terms of energy,
they also last six to seven times as long as
incandescent bulbs, saving the university
money in terms of both replacement bulbs
and custodial time to install them, said JR
Fulton, capital planning and sustainability
manager for Housing and Food Services,
who is still trying to figure out what to do
with 8,000 incandescent bulbs that he has
collected over the past year and a half as a
result of the program.
Meanwhile, in 2000, the university
modified its thermostat settings, lowering
them from 72 to 68 in the winter, increasing
them from 72 to 78 in the summer, resulting
in an estimated 4 percent drop in energy
usage. At the same time, the school
changed the way it operated the power
plant, cutting out back-up boilers so that
they were not constantly using energy. It
also invested $900,000 to replace 1,750
older toilets with low-flow models, which
use between one-third and one-half the
amount of water. (The university also experimented
with 150 water-free urinals, but
discovered they cost too much to maintain.)
The efforts worked: Between 2000 and
2005, total UW direct greenhouse gas
emissions declined nine percent, according
to the university, even though the campus
population increased by seven percent during
the same time period. The conservation
measures also resulted in considerable
cost savings: The university estimates that
between 1996 and 2007, it avoided $58 million
in utility costs.
Nonetheless, overall energy consumption
continues to increase, due to growing
enrollment and additional electricity demands
from computers and other sophisticated
equipment, Chapman said. So the
university still has a long way to go if it is to
reach its goal of carbon neutrality.
Although there is not yet a timeline for
reaching that goal, the plan is due in
September 2009.
Purchasing carbon credits will likely be
part of that plan, Chapman said. But in the
meantime, “We’re going to take a more
strategic look at going after some of the
more difficult conservation measures,” he
said.
Meanwhile, to encourage better conservation
habits, the university plans to create
a building benchmarking program that
will allow users to track data relating to energy
consumption of each building on campus.
“We want people to be able to go onto
the computer, click on any building, and
see what it’s doing,” said Clara Simon, the
university’s sustainability coordinator for
capital projects.
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Clara Simon, the university’s sustainability
coordinator for capital projects, says UW plans to
create a program to monitor energy consumption in
every campus building.
(Photo by Doug Wilson, Black Star, for CrossTalk)
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But conservation is only one aspect of a
sustainable building, said Simon, whose job
is to ensure that the university’s LEEDcertified
projects—four have been completed;
18 others are currently in the
works—are in compliance. Sustainability,
Simon said, is about creating great spaces
where people feel good, because when
people feel happy in an office or classroom,
they’ll stay there longer, work
harder and learn more. So when it comes
to the university’s new buildings and renovations,
Simon must make sure that energy
efficiency is just one aspect being considered.
Natural lighting, water conservation,
non-toxic materials, air flow, access to public
transportation, and bicycle parking also
need to be priorities, she said. “My goal is
to get this to be business as usual, because
this is how buildings should be built.”
Already, more than 75 percent of the
UW population commutes to campus in
something other than a single-occupancy
vehicle. That’s no accident: The university
spends $16.5 million a year on its U-Pass
program, which subsidizes public transportation
and uses innovative parking fee
structures to encourage people who choose
to drive to do so less.
The department is also downsizing its
own fleet of 700 vehicles, which is possible
in part because of an innovative vehiclesharing
arrangement it started two years
ago; through this “U-Car” program, departments
share vehicles that are dispersed
around campus, and are only billed for the
hours they use them. About a third of the
fleet runs on biofuel blends. The university
also has half a dozen electric vehicles and
three plug-in hybrids, and plans to buy
more. It is also trying to encourage more
bicycle commuting—already, some 5,000
students, faculty and staff pedal their way
to campus on any given day—by adding indoor
bicycle enclosures to existing outdoor
bicycle racks and lockers.
The goal, said Josh Kavanagh, director
of transportation services, is to avoid committing
more infrastructure to cars. “If we
can forestall that infrastructure, people will
find another way,” he said. Keeping the car
culture to a minimum is key to the university’s
future, he said. Not only does it result
in a healthier and less stressful environment
for students, faculty and staff, but it
ensures that the university can get the community
and political support it needs to
continue to expand. So while environmental
stewardship is near and dear to
Kavanagh’s heart, “the true underlying
passion for me,” he said, “is higher education
and keeping that accessible to people.”
Michael Meyering is equally passionate
about his work. He is project manager for
UW’s Housing and Food Services composting
and vending, and since January of
2007 has been trying to reduce the amount
of waste it produces, researching and testing
new ways to package and serve products.
Styrofoam is out; compostable cups
coated with polylactide or cornstarch are
in. Polystyrene forks, spoons and knives
are out; compostable cutlery made of corn
and potatoes is in. Soon plastic wrap will
be out, too, replaced with biowrap made
from cornstarch.
Meyering estimates that there is a 75
percent participation rate in the composting
program, up from about 40 percent
when, spurred on by concerned students,
faculty and staff, Housing and Food
Services instituted the program a year and
a half ago. (The dining halls had been composting
their kitchen waste and coffee
grounds since 2004). Not only has UW
kept more than 500 tons of material out of
the landfill, including an estimated three
million pieces of cutlery, it has also seen its
disposable packaging costs drop by nine
percent, according to Meyering. That’s
partly because the university requests that
vendors reduce and improve their packaging.
“We want to hold them responsible,”
said Meyering. And that has implications
far beyond the University of Washington:
By networking with other colleges and universities
that have similar concerns,
Meyering hopes to influence the way those
vendors do business off-campuses, too.
Now Housing and Food Services, encouraged
by SEED, is beginning to expand
its composting program from the dining
halls to the residence halls, which is where
much of that take-out packaging winds up.
At this point, only one residence hall is
part of a pilot program; eventually the idea
is to have composting available in all of
them, so the university can achieve its goal
of zero waste—either recycling or composting
everything that isn’t used.
“It’s a very noble project,” Meyering
said. “If we can create an environment
with zero waste, I think we’ll impact how
students look at the planet and how they
treat it.”
That’s how Tracey MacRae feels. As
general manager and executive chef of the
university’s popular McMahon 8 dining
hall, she’s doing what she can to minimize
the university’s footprint and promote
healthy eating habits, taking into account
the nutritional content and environmental
impacts of the ingredients she’s using.
Given budgetary considerations, that’s not
always easy, but it’s important, she said.
“The way I can effect change is in my own
house,” said MacRae, who came to the
university six years ago when it was revamping
McMahon to reflect a new food
consciousness.
Today, the university’s Housing and
Food Services spends 26 percent of its budget
on local, organic and natural foods.
MacRae said that translates into 25 to 35
percent of the food she serves, and that the
figure increases by two to three percent
each quarter. In season, most of the produce
comes from within 200 miles of
Seattle. MacRae also makes use of a rooftop
herb and vegetable garden atop her
dining hall, where, per her request, campus
gardening services tends a wide variety of
crops, from squash and tomato plants to
basil, sage, garlic and horseradish. Also local
is the chicken, the cage-free eggs and
the natural beef she serves. And she doesn’t
stop there: She refuses to stock Frito-
Lay products, instead offering all-natural
Kettle Chips and Tim’s Cascade snacks,
which are trans-fat free. In the future, she’d
like to stop carrying bottled water, too, and
instead have customers fill up compostable
cups or re-usable containers from a water
station.
MacRae knows she can’t stop serving
chicken strips and French fries—that
would never fly at a college campus. But
she does sell the waste oil from the fryers
to a company that converts it to biodiesel.
“I take what I do in my personal life to
my professional life,” said MacRae, a former
vegan who has long paid attention to
environmental issues and who becomes
impatient with people who do not. Like so
many of her peers at UW, MacRae thinks
the course of action, while it may prove
challenging, is obvious. “It’s not a complicated
thing,” MacRae said. “Let’s save the
planet.”
