Faculty, staff and students collaborate to minimize the university's footprint
They call themselves the Green Lunch Group.
Every month at San Diego State, over brown bag lunches, campus community members discuss green initiatives from their respective areas of campus.
“Faculty, students and staff have begun to sit down together informally to talk about sustainability and to trade stories, and a group that aims to make connections across campus has emerged,” said Dean of Undergraduate Studies Geoffrey Chase, who initiated the meetings. “As the conversations have taken place over the last couple of years, energy has grown and the group has become more cohesive.”
Their work is a beginning, but it is also an extension of years of forward-thinking and innovation at all levels of operation at San Diego State University.
“There have always been people at SDSU concerned about the long-term viability of the campus and the sustainability of the planet,” Chase said.
Exactly 10 years ago, the Shared Vision conversations initiated by President Stephen L. Weber resulted in five campus priorities — including wise use of campus resources. Since then, efforts to minimize SDSU’s footprint have accelerated.
One result was a joint project with San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit System to construct a trolley station on campus.
The collaboration of the Green Lunch Group takes this early commitment to a new level. Since its inception, it has precipitated a sustainability task force within the SDSU Senate and a unanimously passed resolution to prioritize green issues and to lobby the California State University system to do the same.
Sounding the alarm
One of the pioneers of sustainability is SDSU’s own Walt Oechel, biology professor, director of the SDSU Global Change Research Group and an SDSU alumnus.
From his lab on the mesa came some of the first smoking-gun evidence that human activity causes global climate change.
“I spent years making sure it was right, that it wasn’t just a local phenomenon, because it was such an important finding,” he said. “The science was clear in the late 1970s that human use of fossil fuel, and resultant CO2 emission, would cause climate warming.”
Walt Oechel, left, gives instructions to students
doing field work in Mexico.
Despite the growing body of evidence from him and hundreds of other researchers, the warnings fell on deaf ears for many years.
In 1999, Oechel joined more than 50 scientific experts in addressing Congress about their failure to heed the warnings, personally expressing his astonishment that legislators had ignored warnings from the scientific community.
“I guess it takes several decades for policy to catch up with the science,” he said. “What is really frustrating is to hear people say, now, ‘if we had only known about human impacts on climate warming, we could have done something earlier.’ We did know.”
Starting at home
As Oechel continued to sound harsh warnings about the severity of the situation, campus decision-makers began looking at the impacts a large campus like SDSU has on the environment in terms of energy usage and waste.
The hallmark of campus energy-saving measures, the co-generation plant, was completed in 1984. Today, the plant allows the university to co-generate most of its own energy twice as efficiently as utility energy.
Bill Lekas in SDSU's Cogeneration Plant.
On the heels of the plant came experimental solar energy technologies like photovoltaic power production and solar panels on several building roofs, which take advantage of the sun’s rays to heat water and provide power. Physical Plant also installed low-flow showers in the gym, permeable ground surfaces that replenish groundwater and computer-operated irrigation that shuts off during moist weather.
But technology like this doesn’t just appear on campus, and it doesn’t automatically work. For more than 20 years, SDSU energy manager Bill Lekas has identified opportunities to use emerging energy solutions, moved quickly to take advantage of them and tweaked and combined methods to maximize energy efficiency.
“I like being out on a limb; I like taking risks,” he said. “And I get a lot of support from the administration in doing so.”
Solar panels on top of Physics-Astronomy
Building.
Of the numerous projects he has initiated, none is more representative of the enterprising spirit behind campus sustainability than the solar hybrid lighting project. Lekas heard that Sempra Energy was looking for large institutions to test out the new lighting system. He volunteered the university, making it one of only seven test sites in the nation.
As with any new technology, he knew there would be glitches, so he installed the system in his own office first, so he could work out the kinks before introducing the lighting to other areas of campus. After many reconfigurations, he was able to report his findings so the technology could be perfected.
Taking chances on projects like solar hybrid lighting and working diligently to make them work have paid off in cost savings — Lekas estimates that the co-generation plant saved the university $4 million last year — and lowered energy-usage for the campus, and helped produce less costly energy-saving methods for public use.
Carrying the torch
Taking their cues from people like Oechel and Lekas, the next generation seems willing to carry the sustainability torch.
“Students at San Diego State are very active and passionate about this,” said Ian Bevan, outgoing president of the Enviro-Business Society (E3), which started in 2005 with a membership of 50 students that has grown to more than 270.
Members of the Enviro-Business Society.
The society publicized the new campus recycling center with a sorority/fraternity contest that brought in more than six tons of recyclable material and petitioned to have the Aztec Center renovated according to the environmentally responsible LEED Silver Standard. Currently, they are working with Physical Plant Services to finalize a bio-diesel reactor that would turn unusable oil from Aztec Shops into fuel for campus vehicles.
Members work tirelessly (they once had eight events in one week), and are savvy about connecting with audiences: They fuse entertainment with education for students and have earned enough clout to sit side-by-side with campus decision-makers when issues of sustainability are discussed.
“I would say that the importance of sustainability and what it means campuswide has had a lot to do with the students,” Chase said. “Because of their work and commitment, the campus is clearer, more focused, more energetic and more engaged with these critical challenges.”
Recalibrating
Though there has long been activity on various parts of campus, this collaboration among campus veterans and new blood is forging a new frontier in campus sustainability at SDSU.
“Sustainability is for the long term,” Chase said. “We’re not going to come up with answers to all the challenges we face by the end of this decade; we’re going to have to recalibrate our mindset to continue to address this problem now and long into the future.”
His ambition — and Oechel’s — is to turn SDSU into a positive example of sustainability for the San Diego community and beyond.
“All of our new construction should be with energy efficiency and sustainability in mind,” Oechel said. “If we use state-of-the-art practices, we can greatly decrease energy use, decrease lifetime costs and provide research opportunities for our students and faculty. It would be fantastic if SDSU is, in the near future, a demonstration, model and example of best practices for sustainability.”
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Credits
- Story by Lauren Coartney
- Graphics by John Signer
- Banner photograph by Jim Comeau, the Daily Aztec staff photographer
- Edited by Coleen L. Geraghty
Division of University Relations and Development
San Diego State University
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