At catawba college, every day is earth day: this North Carolina campus has become a role model for a sustainable future - Brief Article

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Sept, 2001 by Nicole Rivard

On many college campuses a pond is a landscape element, valued more for how it will look in the viewbook rather than for its effect on the environment. At Catawba College, on the other hand, it is a conservationist's dream. In 1999, the school became the first in North Carolina to place campus property--a 300-acre tract of land occupying the area at the confluence of Second Creek and the South Yadkin River--under a conservation easement to protect it from development.

This wildlife preserve and the other programs initiated by the school's Center for the Environment were created with the goals of water quality protection, land preservation, and the education of the "budding conservationists" enrolled in the environmental program.

That same philosophy is embodied in the new building that houses Catawba's Center for the Environment that administrators unveiled this month. Besides using recycled materials throughout the building process and recycling construction materials, the college installed an environmentally friendly heating and cooling system.

"We are an environmental program made up of many very committed people," says John Wear, the center's director. "It made sense to have a building that embodied our beliefs. We set out to build something that could become an example for green design or sustainable design."

The new center has already been the subject of a PBS documentary called Environmental Partners: Designing a Sustainable Future. "We had a state senator visit," recalls Wear, "and I later heard he was in Raleigh telling everyone that all our buildings should be made this way."

The center will house classrooms and laboratories for the environmental studies program, and will serve the community and state in hosting environmentally oriented programs and research.

Anyone Can Do It

Some of the "green design" buildings one reads about or visits are not successful. This type of failure can cause people to back away from the concept. Administrators at Catawba tried to use proven technologies so they could set an example regionally for all types of institutions and corporations. The center is an academic building, but it shares many functions and features of an office complex, Wear says.

The structural components of the building include triple-glazed windows filled with argon gas, insulation made from shredded newspaper and beams made from wood waste laminated by non-toxic glues.

In addition, photovoltaic panels in the walls capture energy and store it in batteries on the third floor. Supplementing electricity in this way can reduce electric costs.

Perhaps the most interesting and cost-effective technology is the building's geothermal exchange system, which has already proven itself in the dorms. A geothermal exchange system uses the earth's temperature to moderate the temperature of the building. Builders dug 40 wells, 240 feet deep, for this building alone. Water from the wells is piped up to ground level where exchangers heat and cool it as needed.

"We don't know the savings yet for this building, but we have other systems on campus that have yielded substantial savings," says Wear.

He is referring to the four dormitories also equipped with geothermal systems. Although the geothermal exchange system cost $500,000 more than a conventional system, the school has saved $35,000 a year on the heating bill and has reduced cooling costs by $63,000, for a total savings of $98,000 in one year.

"They were expecting it to take 15 years for the payoff, and now it looks more like it will take five years to pay for the cost of the system," Wear says. The faster break-even projection is partly due to the rise in oil prices.

Environmentally Friendly Furnishings

Conference tables made from sunflower seeds, desks made from wheat, and table legs made of cardboard are among the green furnishings found in Catawba's Center for the Environment. When selecting the products, administrators considered whether manufacturers used recycled materials, and the products' ability to be recycled further when they outlived their usefulness.

"You'll find a lot of Herman Miller furniture in the building," says Wear. "It has a high recycle content, and underneath the chairs there is an illustration describing how the chair can be dismantled and how its parts can be reused for recycling."

The center's building process, too, was designed around environmental efficiencies. Students found ways to recycle wall board, which usually generates a lot of waste and clogs landfills. Sending it to a recycler in a town 40 minutes away cost $75 per truckload, but it would have cost $140 to send it to the landfill. This inspired the contractors to change the way they disposed of wall board on future projects.

That students, faculty, and administrators worked together to make the center a reality was one of the most rewarding things about his project, says Wear.

"I got a question from an educator who asked, `How did you get the administration to do this?' "Wear recalls. "We structured it so staff members, faculty and students were all involved in the process. We interviewed them about what their needs were. It was team oriented, and that's what makes it a unique product. It fills the real needs--and that isn't always done"