Being Green

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Winter 2005

Call it the greening of the New England college campus.

When Mount Holyoke College built its new Unified Science Center, it insisted not only on the usual stateof-the-art facilities designed for collaborative work, but also on a wide range of features to advance the concept of sustainability. To minimize trucking and attendant pollution, more than a quarter of the building materials were to be manufactured within 50 miles of the college's home in South Hadley, Mass. Steel used on the project would be 90 percent recycled, and more than half the wood used would come from renewable forests. As a result of the attention to sustainability, the building is among the nation's first academic facilities to earn certification from the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.

The University of Connecticut, meanwhile, is attempting to build the first university sports facility that meets LEED standards. The $40 million stadium complex may include permeable pavement to reduce rainwater runoff and rain gardens to collect it. Three-quarters of the offices in the complex will be lit by sunlight.

Across the region, colleges are trying to create environmentally friendly campuses. At the University of Vermont, dozens of students, faculty and staff took part in a two-day competition to choose an architect for the redesign of the George D. Aiken Center, the 25-year-old home i of UVM's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. William Maclay Architects & Planners of Waitsfield, Vt., was chosen for its "green" approach to the building and its systems. The process of developing the environmentally friendly building is being incorporated into the school's curriculum. Undergraduate and graduate students are investigating green technologies and materials, and a cost-benefits analysis class is being developed for spring 2005.

In Maine, the College of the Atlantic unveiled a plan to eliminate production of CO2 and other pollutants and use wind power from a Native American wind farm on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota until a wind power facility is built in Maine. Harvard announced that it had cut power consumption in campus dorms by up to 12 percent over a year and a half, simply by getting students to do things such as turning off their computers when they're not in use.