VCU news

By Gary Robertson

Amanda Schutt, a senior environmental studies major, has six recycling bins in her apartment to ensure that everything that can be recycled is recycled.

She takes her own bags to the grocery store so she won’t have to use paper or plastic, sips tap water from a reusable bottle, limits her showers to three to five minutes, buys recycled paper towels and walks or bikes to campus.

As Virginia Commonwealth University celebrates the Year of the Environment, students such as Amanda are doing all they can to keep the planet safe.

“You could talk the talk,” she said. “But if others don’t see you do it, they won’t.”

Setting a good example in the community also is important, and on a this school year “Green Unity for VCU,” a student organization devoted to promoting environmental awareness and education, joined with service-learning students from various departments to pick up trash and recyclable items along the 1100 block of West Grace Street in Richmond.

Green Unity, of which Schutt is an executive officer, has adopted the block as part of Richmond’s “Clean City” program and conducts several cleanups annually. The group also is planning to adopt at least one other block near campus.

As a university, VCU is striving to become a model for sustainability. Establishing the newly created position of director of sustainability to monitor the university’s efforts to go green represents a major step forward.

The public face of those efforts includes events such as VCU President Michael Rao’s signing of the “American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment,” a renewal of a pledge VCU made two years ago to reduce global warming by working to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions on college campuses.

On the lighter side, the university staged a “dumpster dive” to vividly demonstrate how many recyclables get thrown away as trash. Dressed in protective clothing, Jordan Starbuck, sustainability coordinator at VCU, waded into the trash, muck and all, to sort out recyclables from everything else.

Efforts across the campuses at VCU show a concerted effort toward sustainability that reaches in many directions but starts with a plan.

Director of Sustainability

Jacek Ghosh,  a former community organizer and non-profit leader who holds a master’s degree in architecture, is well into his second year as VCU’s director of sustainability.

His sights are now set on May, the deadline for the university to create a Climate Action Plan, a road map leading to “climate neutrality” by 2050.

“Climate neutrality means that we’ll have no, zero, green house gas emissions,” Ghosh said. “It’s pretty daunting, but that’s our goal.”

VCU already is making great progress. In October, the Sustainable Endowments Institute named VCU a Campus Sustainability Leader and raised its “green report card” grade for the 2010 grading period to B, from B- in the previous year, and from C- in the year before that.

Taking steps toward a greener, more sustainable campus is not only the right thing to do, Ghosh said, but it also fulfills the ambitions that prospective students and their families have for institutions of higher education.

“The ‘Princeton Review’ had a far-reaching statistic that said students and their parents look at sustainability as a criterion 67 percent of the time” when choosing a college or university, Ghosh added.

Energy Conservation on Campus

In ways small and large, VCU has worked to reduce its energy consumption and carbon footprint.

Thousands of energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs have replaced incandescent bulbs, more than $60,000 has been spent on new bicycle and scooter racks to encourage pollution-free commuting, and natural gas has replaced fuel oil to generate steam at the main steam plant.

By caulking, filling cracks, adding insulation, turning off lights and taking other pro-active conservation efforts, VCU saved approximately $1.6 million in energy costs in 2009.

In addition, improvements and modifications at the steam plant have reduced the rate for producing 1,000 pounds of steam from $27 in 2007 to approximately $24 today.

Ahead are projects to place energy-producing photovoltaic arrays on parking garages on the medical and Monroe Park campuses to generate electricity from the sun.

A half dozen university buildings are or will soon be seeking LEED certification, in line with a university policy that all new campus construction be built to at least LEED silver level standards. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the U.S. Green Building Council’s rating system for designing and constructing the world’s greenest, most energy efficient and highest-performing buildings.

Rice Center

Fittingly, VCU’s Year of the Environment has spread well beyond the bounds of the University’s urban campus in Richmond, to the 343-acre Rice Center for Environmental Sciences, about 30 miles southeast of Richmond in Charles City County.

At the Center for Conservation Biology there, the College of William and Mary and VCU are working collaboratively to rebuild the state’s once-ravaged bald eagle population by pinpointing eagle nesting sites, to spur interest in conserving the species.

In February, the Rice Center also embarked on a landmark project with the James River Association and Luck Stone Corp. to restore the Atlantic sturgeon to the James River, by creating an artificial reef where sturgeon can spawn and deposit their eggs.

Additionally, the Rice Center’s Education Building was recently recognized as the first building in Virginia to achieve LEED Platinum Certification, the highest sustainability rating possible.

Innovations in the Dining Center

Inspired by student interest and inquiries, VCU Dining Services and its business partner, ARAMARK, have turned the Shafer Court Dining Center into a laboratory for good environmental practices and sustainability.

A seismic shift came in the spring of 2009, when the dining center went trayless, following two semesters of gradually reducing the number of trays to curb food waste and water usage.

Tamara Highsmith, dining sales and services manager for VCU, said eliminating just one tray can save a third- to a half-gallon of water. And when you do not wash trays, you also keep detergent and chemicals out of the environmental stream.

A study by ARAMARK and a partner corporation found that at the University of Maine in Farmington, one of the first colleges to go trayless, food wastes also were reduced by 46 pounds per person annually.

The impact on the environment from such numbers is potentially staggering at a large university like VCU, which in the last academic year recorded 960,000 visitors to the dining center over two semesters.

ARAMARK also has become an aggressive recycler, particularly of the steady stream of boxes and other food containers that flow into the dining center. Mike Martin, an associate district manager for the company, noted that three recycling dumpsters earmarked for the dining center used to be emptied only once a week.

“Now they’re being dumped every day -- they’re beginning to call me the ‘cardboard police,’” Martin said.

To reduce travel costs and air pollution, ARAMARK has tried to be creative about using local suppliers, such as a bagel shop and an area dairy.

One exotic vendor is “Twin Oaks,” a ‘60s-era cooperative community in Louisa County, which supplies Tofu and vegan sausage to VCU. The community has practiced ecological sustainability for more than 40 years.

Other conservation steps by the dining center include converting the 200 gallons of cooking oil produced weekly into biofuels, switching to reusable containers for takeout food and employing floor-cleaning machines that electronically charge water rather than using harsh chemicals.

In the works is an agreement to pulp the dining hall’s food wastes and transport them to a Virginia Department of Corrections unit for composting.

Recycling as a virtue

Students have been on the front lines of VCU’s recycling efforts, which in 2009 culminated in the recycling of 2.2 million pounds of mixed paper, scrap metal, shredded documents, computers, plastic containers and other materials.

Students from every part of campus engaged in RecycleMania 2010, competing against colleges and universities from across the country for 10 weeks to see which institution could collect the largest amount of recyclables per capita, the largest amount of total recyclables, the least amount of trash per capita and could post the highest recycling rate.

VCU residence halls have been actively engaged in recycling throughout the school year. For example, the 1,340 residents in Rhoads and Brandt halls have been using reusable and compostable cups during social functions, keeping plastic cups out of the waste stream.

The Year of the Environment Committee also sponsored the MCV Conservation Challenge, which ended March 31, and was aimed at reducing a building’s energy consumption.

To speed the collection of recyclable materials across campus, Steven Heinitz, recycling and reuse coordinator at VCU, now has housekeeping staff move the materials outside, so they can be picked up in a central location.

Students Take the Lead

Green Unity for VCU holds major events each year to promote its and the university’s vision for a sustainable Earth. In November, it brought everything from a composting workshop to a natural foods producer to the Student Commons Plaza for show-and-tell, as well as hands-on activities. 

In April, Green Unity is working with the Physical Plant Department, as well as student and community volunteers, to launch its two-phase “Gardens for Life” project.

The first phase involves replacing existing evergreen vegetation in beds at the Trani Center for Life Sciences with plants that are better able to handle rainfall, especially during heavy downpours.

A later second phase envisions the creation of two “rain gardens,” one in the courtyard of the Life Sciences complex and the other in an area between Harrison and Cary streets.

The rain gardens will be landscaped depressions surrounded by berms and filled with native plants. The plants will filter and clean rainwater runoff from walkways and roofs, reducing pollution going into the Chesapeake Bay. Benches arranged around the rain gardens will invite passersby to pause and reflect.

During Alternative Spring Break last year, a number of VCU students gave up vacation to get their hands dirty in wetland and trail restoration projects in the James River Park. 

To instill the environmental spirit in low-income middle school students, VCU’s Division of Community Engagement is reaching outside the confines of the university.

 With the help of a $400,000, two-year grant it won from the Corporation for National and Community Service, the division will be establishing summer academies for middle-school teachers in science, technology and mathematics from the highest-needs schools.

The teachers will, in turn, learn to create innovative lesson plans to entice students to help solve environmental problems in their own communities, and to become involved in energy and environmental issues.

The Road Ahead

During the Year of the Environment, active environmentalists such as student Amanda Schutt are hoping that VCU’s efforts to spark awareness about the fragility of the environment will lead to behavior changes that will help preserve it.

“If we can just get students to change a light bulb, if we can just get students to walk the extra step to put their can in a recycling bin instead of a trash can – then things will have changed.

“The Year of the Environment will end, but the energy and passion will continue,” Schutt said.