This was the committee’s first year as a standing committee, and the new membership structure was quite effective, bringing together students, faculty, and staff from the Zilkha Center, Facilities, Dining Services, and Information Technology. At the beginning of the year we assessed College progress on various environmental fronts and decided to focus our efforts on three general areas: the College’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, sustainable food, and efforts to reduce waste.
Thanks to ongoing investments in conservation projects and reductions in the cost of natural gas that induced the College to use more natural gas in the heating plant instead of residual oil, the College is on track to meet its goal of reducing GHG emissions to 10 percent below 1990/91 levels ahead of schedule, and to do so despite significant increases in campus square footage. Thus CEAC spent this year examining potential new goals the College might adopt, assessing how such goals might be achieved, and beginning to estimate the costs of attaining them. Particular challenges to achieving further GHG reductions that the Committee discussed include: how to adequately track all sources of GHG emissions, including travel; how further reductions in GHG emissions might be met if the College continues to grow steadily in square footage as it has over the past two decades; how to account for the uncertainty introduced by climate change itself, including the likely need for additional climate controls for buildings such as dormitories that are not currently cooled; how to formulate a catalog of energy conservation projects that would include the up-front cost and expected return on each project and how to implement such projects given the need for the buildings to remain in use; and the potential role of purchased offsets in achieving reduced emissions.
In the area of sustainable food, the Committee focused on assessing the College’s progress in improving the sustainability of the food that is served to our community, gathering information on what other educational institutions are doing with respect to providing sustainable food, and developing a better measure of the extent to which a college is succeeding in providing sustainable food. Finally, the Committee considered three main issues in College waste reduction efforts: the possibility of switching to zero-sort (“single stream”) recycling, addressing the amount of un-composted food waste in campus buildings other than dining halls, and the problem of paper coffee cup waste.
-Lara Shore-Sheppard, Professor of Economics