Sustainability Report Card - October 24, 2007
Good afternoon!
This is the third time I have spoken on this occasion. While preparing these remarks I could only marvel at how much things have changed in three years.
While the concept of sustainability had been around for decades, in 2005 it was still fresh to those outside academic and environmental circles. That is no longer the case.
Just this year New York Governor Michael Bloomberg and Florida's Charlie Crist followed California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's lead by embracing policies to boost energy efficiency and reduce pollution. And, the governors of the nation's most prominent states are not pushing their constituents – it is the other way around.
Thanks to rising energy prices, increasing concern about climate change and grassroots activism, Americans seem to be leading on this issue, and their leaders following. I feel the same kind of gathering cultural shift here at the University of Florida. Thanks to the work of the UF Sustainability Committee and the Office of Sustainability, what began as a small movement among a handful of faculty and graduate students in the mid-1990s is sweeping the university. It's an impressive thing to watch, and to be a part of.
I think my sustainability report card covering the past 12 months will paint a solid portrait of this institutional renaissance. But, while encouraging, I also want to make the point that we are now at something of a crossroads. We have taken the easy and obvious steps. More difficult decisions lie ahead.
To keep up our progress as we enter this rockier terrain, we need to unify behind a vision of what this university can achieve. Recognizing this, our Office of Sustainability is coordinating meetings among this university's many stakeholders this semester. I will focus the second part of my talk on this important process and how it will help guide us.
Last year, I said we would make combating global warming a focus of this year's efforts. I will get to that in a moment, but I thought I would start this year's report card with ways we are greening our already beautiful natural campus.
As many of you know, we are trying to buy more locally grown food. Well, you can't get any more local than our own trees. In a month or two, the navels, Satsuma's, tangerines and other citrus now ripening on our 80 new fruit trees, will be ready to enjoy. And, people won't be the only ones enjoying our fruitful grounds. Visiting butterflies can now flit to no less than 12 butterfly gardens. This year we continued to cultivate native flora, adding to a planted inventory of 6,000 native trees, shrubs and plants.
To create habitat for small animals, we are also pruning less. And, we are channeling storm water to fill rain ponds and irrigate plant beds. You can feel it walking around: The grounds seem a bit wilder, more free form, while also retaining a formal air. With the citrus trees, the look reminds me of the way natural Florida comes across in pre-war postcards – settled, but not necessarily defeated.
We are also bringing nature to places where it's always been shunned. This past spring, we were among the first institutions in the state to create a green roof. Up above the Perry Construction Yard adjacent to Rinker Hall, native grasses and flowers thrive atop 2,400 feet of living, breathing roof.
Green roofs help control the temperature of buildings naturally because soil and plants act as insulators. They absorb rather than reflect sunlight, reducing the urban heat effect. And, in trapping and reusing rainwater, they turn a problem – storm water runoff – into a solution – thriving plants for all creatures to enjoy.
So, on the third year of this initiative, sustainability has literally taken root not only on our grounds, but also on our rooftops. It's a very local change, but it also counts globally as we try to shrink our contribution to global warming.
To a surprising degree, green roofs and other green building enhancements help cut carbon emissions. That's because, in this country today, buildings account for 71 percent of electricity use and 40 percent of carbon emissions nationwide, eclipsing even the 33 percent from transportation. Buildings add carbon because power plants burn fossil fuels to heat and cool them.
Here on our campus, over half our carbon emissions are generated by our buildings. Not only that, but heating and cooling also costs us a lot of money. If we can reduce these costs, we can spend that money elsewhere. Call it greening for greenbacks: When you consider the state's budget woes, that's quite an incentive.
So, I am pleased that the number of campus buildings being considered for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards continues to grow. So far we have eight LEED certified buildings on our campus, including two that meet LEED "gold" standards. We are submitting four others for certification, while six new buildings under construction are expected to be LEED green buildings.
Even better, we are one of only three universities nationwide piloting a new LEED program for existing buildings. We currently have 32 existing buildings under consideration in this pilot. This is an absolutely vital addition, since we have more than 900 total buildings on campus.
Existing buildings are thornier challenges than might at first appear. Surprisingly, for example, we don't have an easy way to track how much electricity each building uses, which is obviously a problem if we want to cut back.
The good news is, we will begin installing meters tied to individual buildings this spring. Our laboratories also pose an energy and emissions problem. Safety guidelines often require us to change the air in labs frequently, which means air conditioners run constantly to cool each new batch of air.
The only solution is to confine this inefficient process to labs while conditioning other rooms on a normal cycle. We are working on making this change, and we think it will have a big effect.
Meanwhile there are plans afoot to install solar cells atop one of our parking garages. These cells will generate electricity to light the garage at night. With our students having voted to approve a fee for renewable energy projects, this may be the first of many similar projects.
So, our grounds are greener and our buildings leaner with respect to energy and emissions. Our progress may be slow, but what we have done matters. By building or renovating green, we estimate we have so far avoided emissions of nearly 4.5 million pounds of carbon dioxide, equivalent to taking 326 cars off the road or planting 353 acres of mature trees.
This past year, also with an eye toward global warming, we continued to slim down our carbon quotient related to transportation. As you know, we began replacing our fleet of gasoline-powered vehicles with hybrids or alternative fuel vehicles two years ago. We have made some progress in this area, though not enough.
Today our fleet includes 9 electric vehicles, 18 hybrids and 83 flex-fuel vehicles – decent numbers, but not where we need to be considering that our fleet totals some 2,200 vehicles. The $3,000 fee we began charging departments for cars has so far reduced our fleet a little – but not enough! We are working on a pool system that we hope will lead to more improvements in this area.
Last year, I announced we were considering car- and ride-sharing programs. We have since implemented both. I am pleased to say that nearly 300 people are participating in Flexcar, up from 54 initially. Presumably, many of these people choose not to bring a car on campus as a result of this program. Meanwhile, our ride-sharing program, GreenRide, is up and running on the Web. And, our point-to-point campus cab service has proved so popular, we have two full-time drivers and may add more.
If you prefer the bus instead, join the crowd. We recently set a new record of 58,000 rides on a single day on campus buses. Overall, ridership is up to 9 million rides a year! I also said last year that we had started an effort to turn used cooking oil into biodiesel. Today, we are reprocessing over 300 gallons of old oil into biodiesel monthly, with every drop pumped into our diesel fleet.
Plans are in place to scale this amount up to 1,600 gallons monthly by year's end. Last year I said we had a bid out to begin buying biodiesel. Today, each of our 204 diesel vehicles uses 20 percent biodiesel, a percentage that will increase as older vehicles are phased out.
So, our grounds, buildings and transportation are greener this year. That's also true of the food and dining experience on campus. We are ramping up the purchase of locally grown foods. This is important because it cuts transportation miles for food trucked to our campus. Buying locally also helps us support local workers and the local economy.
We piloted local foods at Fresh Foods last year, and it was such as success that we expanded it to Gator Corner. Today as much as 30 percent of the food these dining halls serve is local. When you eat chicken here, drink coffee or enjoy baked goods, they may come from Pilgrim's Pride, Sweetwater Organic or Flowers Bakery.
This is not just about a good cause: Our chef competition last spring proved how great these local foods taste. Meanwhile, vegetarians at UF should count themselves lucky: PETA recently ranked UF one of the ten best vegetarian colleges.
If we've become more sustainable in what we consume, the same is true of what we throw away. The game day recycling program we launched last year has been a real success. In the first four football games of the season, we collected nearly 29,000 pounds of recyclables, up 130 percent from the roughly 12,000 pounds they collected in the first four games last year. We're also recycling all temporary collection boxes rather than landfilling them. Student volunteers, who spent over 320 hours on this project, are to be commended for their hard work.
Meanwhile, in response to demand from students, we added 100 new recycling bins, including outdoor paper collection bins. We also moved forward on indoor collection. At Tigert Hall, the first building where we tried this, collection of cans and bottles increased a whopping 350 percent. Overall campus wide, in the first eight months of 2007, we recycled an average of 5.5 tons per month of cans and bottles.
I said last year that we would make sustainability a bigger part of our curriculum. I am pleased to announce today, we have selected our Provost Fellow to craft the research and education component of our sustainability initiative.
He is the very qualified Thomas Ankersen, legal skills professor and director of the UF Conservation Clinic in the Levin College of Law. Mr. Ankersen will spend at least one semester putting together new ways to instill sustainability in the University of Florida's core academic and research programs at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels.
Meanwhile, per student demand, we have created a sustainability certificate and are working on sustainability minor. All told, today we count over 120 courses that support sustainability. Our "Facets of Sustainability" course has proved very popular. And the provost's office is considering a proposal that would distribute mini-grants to faculty for adding a sustainability component to their classes.
In the longer term, we would like to secure funds from the Florida Legislature for a university-wide sustainability program, one offering more minors as well as master's and doctoral level degrees.
With respect to the social and community aspects of sustainability, all of UF's business partners are continuing to pay full-time employees $2 more than Florida's minimum wage. Meanwhile, UF officials have launched a program for local schools and formed a North Florida chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council.
I just learned this morning that the Sustainability Endowment Institute has issued its College & University Sustainability Report. UF is named one of only 25 "Campus Sustainability Leaders" among 200 public and private universities. Our overall "grade" increased in almost every category.
All of this moves us forward in this grand endeavor. But, we have a problem, and that is that we don't yet have a precise idea where we are headed. The more we answer the easy questions, the more obvious the harder ones become. How sustainable, really, do we want this university to become? We need to think this through carefully. What changes are we willing to accept with regard to cars, scooters or buses on campus?
Mayor Bloomberg has proposed an $8 congestion fee for cars entering Manhattan. Might we want a car free campus core here at UF? How about our comfort level when it comes to air temperature, water consumption, lighting, building materials?
What are we willing to spend on conservation or environmental upgrades compared to classrooms and other physical infrastructure? We have seen some interest among students this year in making UF's investments more transparent. How much weight do we want to give sustainability in our investment decisions?
I could go on, but I think I have made my point that we need to answer some big questions soon. If we don't, we risk disagreements and division, and that has the potential to slow the progress we are making. To get this process started, the Office of Sustainability is coordinating meetings this semester aimed at crafting a sustainability vision for this university. This work involves everyone, from the Board of Trustees to faculty to staff to students.
Across campus, people are meeting in 15 focus areas, such as transportation, dining and procurement. I myself am involved: I look forward to participating in a session on institutional commitment. This spring, the UF Sustainability Committee will compile reports from these meetings into a comprehensive and inclusive sustainability vision. That document will guide us as we develop policies to move forward. It sounds bureaucratic, but the point is simple and important: To agree on goals and map out a path to reach them.
In closing, I would like to say that we owe it to ourselves and to our community not to limit on our ambitions during these discussions. Big universities have the reputation of changing excruciatingly slowly, and unfortunately they often deserve it.
But, we also have a long tradition of serving as incubators for progressive and forward-thinking ideas. We must maintain that tradition with regard to sustainability, so essential to our own health and the health of the planet. In the long run, it may turn out that our greatest impact may not be what we do here on campus, but rather what we inspire in the world.
Thank you.
Bernie Machen