Greening the Campus

While universities are hubs of education and research, they also are large organizations that use material and energy. Carolina has an infrastructure of offices, labs, dormitories, etc., that have a significant impact on the quality of the environment and on the quality of life of employees and visitors. Joining a nationwide Greening of the Campus movement, the faculty, students and staff of Carolina are using our campus as a demonstration site for many of the principles of sustainable energy explored elsewhere in the Energy and the Environment Group. This provides an exciting opportunity to combine the education, research and outreach missions of the campus with the physical operations, giving students and faculty an opportunity to learn from - and apply their work in collaboration with - the staff who administer the campus infrastructure, and giving staff access to some of the most advanced thinking on material and energy use.

The co-generation facility at Carolina provides heat and electricity for the campus at very high efficiency, providing an example of what insightful investment in infrastructure can do to reduce energy use and environmental impacts.

These efforts are being coordinated through the Vice Chancellor's Sustainability Advisory Committee. A first major step in this direction is the recent signing on of this campus to the UK-US Community Carbon Reduction (CRed) Program, with a commitment to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 60% over the next 45 years. This commitment is demonstrated through the development of a state-of-the-art co-generation facility, to the construction of energy efficient buildings, to the establishment of an Office of Sustainability (web link to sustainability.unc.edu/index.asp), to the funding of fare-free bus transport in town, and many other measures. The campus also has exciting plans to bring all of these advances to planned future development, creating a national showcase for advanced energy technologies that will power this campus. And to prepare the next generation of leaders, the Greening the Campus team is working with the Institute for the Environment to offer a Minor in Sustainability, providing students an opportunity to learn the principles of sustainability first-hand from the people on campus who run our own infrastructure.

The campus also recognizes the need for the premier public university in North Carolina to set an example for other institutions on sustainable energy, and to help stimulate the market in emerging sustainable energy technologies created here and elsewhere. We have, therefore, begun an ambitious program to bring those technologies to the campus in ways that will position the state of North Carolina as a center for development and application of these technologies, using the adoption on our campus as a way to stimulate economic growth in the state. From biomass as a means of energy production, to solar panels on dormitories, to biofuels in our vehicles: the Carolina campus is becoming a living lab for the sustainable energy systems and businesses of the future.