As I’ve talked with colleagues about the biggest challenges that they face in their jobs, two central themes have emerged, and these two themes get to the heart of the sustainability officer’s dilemma.  The first is perhaps best told through an anecdote.  A sustainability officer at a major university discovered that his university was spending $5,000 on c-fold paper towels (you know, the kind that when you grab one, five drop out) in a highly-trafficked campus restroom, so he convinced the building manager to remove the paper towels and install quick-dry energy-efficient hand dryers instead.  The project was an economic success, it eliminated a waste stream, and it avoided the environmental impact of the manufacturing of paper towels.  Only one person complained about the project, and the basis of his complaint was that he couldn’t use the electric hand dryers on the Sabbath.  The building manager reacted by putting back the paper towels.

From my perspective, this is not really a story about paper towels at all.  Rather, it is that we so often sacrifice system performance in pursuit of responding to a complaint or solving a problem, when in fact we should optimize the system and then handle anomalies as they arise.  I see this with energy management all the time.  We overcool a building to keep a single hot spot from getting too warm, when we should instead set the building at a proper temperature range and then solve the problem of the hot spot.  Or we cool a building 24/7 to keep a rogue server from overheating when that server should actually be in a data center.  In the paper towel example, perhaps the building manager could have offered a school-branded hand towel (an over-the-top act of customer service, as surely this problem must arise for the complaintant elsewhere).  Or the building manager could have just said no.  But that’s not what happened.  Instead, the performance of the system was sacrificed.  The anomaly drives the system.

If the first theme is a common syndrome of the operational and administrative side of campus, the second theme that I heard over and over again is a syndrome of the academic side of campus: our academic departmental boundaries, and the system of rewards and promotions that exist within and reinforce those boundaries, are ill-suited for the fundamentally multi-disciplinary work of sustainability.  We incentivize our academic scholars to think narrowly, to research narrowly, and to teach narrowly (to the extent that they’re incentivized to teach), and as a result we educate our students narrowly, and they graduate without a broad understanding of how the natural systems upon which their lives depend even function.  And for that, they often start their careers deeply in debt.  It’s no wonder we end up accelerating our own demise – that would be the expected outcome of our higher education system as presently designed, churning out graduates who (mostly unintentionally) will outdo each other in doing us all in.

These two syndromes that form the sustainability officer’s dilemma are both problems of systems design.  I’ve attended every AASHE annual conference since the first AASHE conference in 2006 (and several Greening of the Campus conferences as well), and in my view this seems to be the first time that so many sustainability officers have come together and talked about and framed their challenges in this way.  I believe this represents a significant leap forward in the maturation of the campus sustainability movement.  When we reassemble next year in Los Angeles, I expect to hear many lessons about how my colleagues are finding leverage points to change how these systems function, and even perhaps changing paradigms at their universities.  We will need success stories at the systems level, because for all our LEED buildings and energy and water conservation measures and recycling initiatives, we are still on the pathway to demise.  The earth is finite, and it’s high time our universities educate and act accordingly.

With the emergence of the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) and increasing focus on energy costs and supplies, universities across America are pursuing measures to reduce their energy consumption and their greenhouse gas emissions.  As these schools attempt to measure their results and document savings, I ask how do they really know when they are saving energy?

Let’s assume that a campus building is metered for all utilities, and that these utilities can be tracked on a weekly basis.  And further, let’s assume a two-week experiment, and that at the beginning of the second week space temperatures in the building are changed as part of a new campus building temperature policy to reflect what is considered to be a more efficient range.  If the meter readings were lower in week two than week one, can a utility manager conclude that the energy conservation measure was a success?  Given our experience at Rice University, we would argue that the answer is no.

The energy consumption of a building from one time period to the next is influenced by a number of variables, including outdoor temperature, humidity, time of day, day of the week, and day of the year.  In the example above, week two could have been significantly cooler than week one, potentially leading to a false conclusion about the effectiveness of the new policy, and even masking unintended consequences of changing space temperatures.  However, by creating a weather-normalized baseline model for energy consumption as our energy managers have done at Rice and then comparing this baseline against actual meter data, we submit that utility managers can be much more confident in interpreting their results.

How might one visualize this?  Figure 1 presents one week of data for chilled water consumption at our student center, the Rice Memorial Center.  The y-axis expresses chilled water consumption, and the x-axis represents time (click the graphic to enlarge).  The red line shows the modeled baseline for chilled water consumption for that building.  The variation in the red baseline between daytime and nighttime is obvious, reflecting that we use more chilled water to condition the building during the day than we do at night.  And yet, while the model for each day looks generally similar in shape, it is not exactly the same, because in reality these days were of course not the same.  The blue line represents actual consumption, drawn straight from the chilled water meter at the building in near real-time.  What we see is that due to a variety of conservation measures enacted in that building during the summer of 2009, actual chilled water consumption is now consistently well below the baseline model.  Prior to these initiatives, the baseline and the actual meter readings would have been quite similar.  These results are weather-normalized: we’re not having to guess whether the savings might be related to a cold front or a series of cloudy days.

Figure 1 RMC Chilled Water Consumption

We can use this system to express cumulative building-level savings (or losses) from electricity, chilled water, and steam in dollars.  Figure 2 shows daily utility expenditures for the Rice Memorial Center over a 30-day period (click the graphic to enlarge).  The green bars represent actual daily costs, while the black lines are the predicted costs according to the baseline model.  Notice how each day has a different predicted consumption?  The blue space between the green bars and black lines indicates savings.  On the right side of Figure 2, we see that over a 30-day period, we saved $4,931.49 in steam, $1,618.11 in chilled water, and $780.13 in electricity, for a total utility savings of $7,329.74.

Figure 2 RMC Utility Expenditures

The ability to plot meter data against a predictive baseline is a game-changer for campus energy conservation.  Every two weeks, we hold an interdepartmental meeting to review the performance of a number of our campus buildings using this tool.  Sometimes we see unexpected results that trigger maintenance work orders.  Sometimes we find buildings whose nighttime setback temperatures have been placed in an override mode and need to be restored (and we can see the amount of money that we lost as a result of that decision).  In the case of our own facilities building, when an unexpected electrical load caused us to consume more electricity than predicted by the model, we were able to estimate the size of the additional load, and our maintenance manager tracked it down to a baking booth in the paint shop that had been switched on and left on for several days.  As one of my colleagues frequently observes, this tool allows us to shine the bright light of truth on how we’re consuming energy on our campus.

Rice’s approach to energy modeling is now the basis of a campus energy management product in development by Incuity Software, a subsidiary of Rockwell Automation.  We are working to embed within this system the ability to track greenhouse gas emissions, which would enable us to display and report campus-level and building-level predicted and actual carbon footprints, divisible by type of utility.  The position of our energy management team is that unless energy consumption is tracked against a weather-normalized baseline, we are suspicious of claims of actual savings.  The implications for greenhouse gas reporting are clear: as we develop our inventories and compare them with previous years, did we enact measures that genuinely reduced our emissions, or did cooperative weather make us lucky?  Without a proper baseline, we just don’t know.

(note: a modified version of this posting appeared in the November 2009 edition of the ACUPCC Implementer newsletter)

Over the last several years, Rice has undertaken an ambitious $1 billion construction program, and the bulk of these facilities are now open.  We’re in celebration mode.  Almost all of our new buildings will be submitted for certification under the US Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program, the industry standard for green building in the US that recognizes buildings based on their environmental performance at the increasing levels of LEED-certified, silver, gold, or platinum.  Earlier this month, we learned that one of our new buildings – the Rice Children’s Campus - had achieved certification at the level of LEED-Silver, scoring 37 points (almost gold!).  This marks the very first building at Rice to earn LEED certification at any level (although we expect many more to soon follow).

To date, I’ve worked on approximately a dozen LEED projects for new construction, and not all of them have left me on Cloud 9, or Cloud 37 as it may be.  In fact, there have been a number of dark clouds too.  My experiences – positive and negative – have taught me several process-oriented lessons about LEED that I believe are of value to other campus sustainability professionals as they participate in LEED projects on their own campuses.  They are as follows:

1. Commit from the beginning. Our biggest LEED train-wreck came when we decided to “do LEED” late in the design process of a project.  The project team had not been selected based on LEED credentials, and we quickly discovered both a lack of experience and interest amongst key team members.  After several difficult months, we abandoned the LEED process, although it wasn’t a complete loss as several design improvements were directly attributable to our flirtation with LEED.  The confusion led us to adopt a Sustainable Facilities Policy that clearly outlines our department’s LEED goals for future projects, a remedy that should prevent this sort of problem from occurring again.

2. Seek experienced consultants. Commitment to LEED by the university is just the first step.  The composition of the project team is very important, and prior LEED experience matters, although a lack of experience is not an insurmountable obstacle.  As the university interviews potential architects, contractors, and MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) engineers, they should review not only the LEED experience of each of these consultants, but also (and this is important) of the individuals who will represent these firms on the project team.  Prior LEED experience by the civil engineer and landscape architect are of course helpful too, but not as critical as with the aforementioned team members.

3. Designate the LEED-er. The LEED process needs a steward, and it shouldn’t be the university.  In fact, my preference is to hire a consultant specifically to lead the LEED process, one with a lengthy resume of prior LEED projects and a deep knowledge of a variety of LEED ratings systems and the associated rulings and intricacies of those systems.  This LEED-er can be the commissioning agent, which yields the benefit of engaging the commissioning perspective throughout the project’s design.  However, if the LEED responsibilities lie with one of the primary consultants, such as the architect, MEP, or contractor, then my experience is that the busier they become in the project, the greater the tendency to let their LEED responsibilities slip.

4. Set priorities. It’s not enough for the university to state an expectation that a project will achieve a certain level of LEED certification.  There are numerous pathways to certification, and the consultants need to know what aspects of LEED are of particular importance to the university.  For us, it’s typically energy conservation.

5. Assign responsibility. From the beginning, each project team member should understand their LEED responsibilities.  This includes the credits that they will be expected to complete and the data that they will need to collect either to support their own submittals or those of other team members.

6. Set deadlines. Hand-in-hand with assigning responsibility is the need to set deadlines.  I’ve spent countless hours in meetings where we’ve spun our wheels going down the LEED checklist, listening to consultants say “oh yeah, I need to get to that.”  Procrastination has consequences, and opportunities will be lost.  The following two points highlight the importance for the LEED-er to connect responsibilities with deadlines.

7. Fast-track the energy model. From my perspective, there is no component of the LEED process more important than the energy model, which quantifies the proposed building’s energy consumption and expresses savings in comparison with a baseline “to code” alternate.  If the energy model is prepared in a timely fashion, it serves as a powerful tool that enables the project team to understand the best opportunities for improving their design to save energy.  I’ve participated in meetings where hundreds of thousands of dollars of expected annual utility costs were shed, based on insights and scenarios from a timely energy model.  On the other hand, some of my greatest moments of frustration engaging in the design process have come from MEPs who drag their feet in preparing the building’s energy model.  In fact, with one project, the energy model was nearly a year late, so late that the building was already close to completion.  Any opportunity to use the energy model to improve the design had long since evaporated, and with it the chance to save significant money for the university.

The need for a timely energy model goes beyond just influencing the project’s design.  Up to 10 LEED points are available for energy conservation – potentially a sizable share of the final point total – and uncertainty over the number of anticipated energy conservation points makes estimating the project’s overall LEED point total and level of certification difficult.  On several projects, if we had known the results of the energy model sooner than we did, we might have targeted (and ultimately achieved) higher levels of LEED certification.  My conclusion is that there are numerous compelling reasons to fast-track the energy model (and conversely, no clear reasons not to).

8. Submit the design credits early. For a small fee, the USGBC allows project teams to submit design-related LEED credits early, and then follow-up with construction-related credits (and deferred design credits) at a later date.  I find this opportunity valuable for several reasons.  First, as many of the LEED prerequisites are design-oriented, if there are any potential problems with these mandatory credits, the issues will be identified early enough such that corrective action can be incorporated into the project’s construction.  Second, a two-stage submittal tends to prevent procrastination.  Rather, it has the effect of spreading the work more evenly across the project’s timeline.  Third, early knowledge of expected design credits adds certainty to the project’s final LEED outcome, and could even embolden a team to “stretch” for a higher goal.

9. Want it! Implementing the previous eight recommendations will in my view significantly improve the LEED process for a new building, but there’s still something missing here, and that’s setting the right tone.  You have to want it!  In my experience, there is a noticeable difference in the performance of the project teams that are genuinely enthusiastic about pursuing LEED certification and those who think it’s just one more requirement.  The university’s team members need to convey a consistent desire to achieve the project’s environmental goals, and likewise should choose those consultants who also demonstrate a similar attitude.  LEED can be fun with a motivated team, and a nightmare with those who would just as soon not be bothered.

With these nine lessons, hopefully we’ll have more of our campus sustainabilty professionals on cloud nine celebrating successful LEED projects.  Of course, no project is perfect, and problems always arise.  However, by carefully constructing the LEED process, the campus sustainabilty professional can at least ensure that when dark clouds appear, they’re more likely to have a silver (or gold, or platinum) lining.

This past March, Rice University hosted an extraordinary conference entitled “Transforming the Metropolis: Creating Sustainable and Humane Cities” that featured many of the speakers whom we would hope to see as keynoters when we travel to conferences.  The talks from this conference are now available online and are posted below.  In lieu of actually going to a conference, consider blocking off time on your calendar, closing your email, unplugging your telephone, and allowing yourself the time to be inspired from afar (without the CO2 emissions from air travel!):

• Day 1a: The City in the Twenty-First Century: What Works, What Doesn’t – Mayors Bill White (Houston), Antanas Mockus (Bogotá), Mustafa Seyed Kamal (Karachi), Shuku Forer (Rehovot)
• Day 1b: Natural Tendencies and Natural Limits, Part 1 – William E. Rees (Univ of British Columbia) and Robert Bruegmann (University of Illinois)
• Day 1c: Natural Tendencies and Natural Limits, Part 2: Water, Energy, and the City – Perry L. McCarty (Stanford University) and Amy Myers Jaffe ( Rice Energy Program)
• Day 1d: Afternoon Welcome – David Leebron (President of Rice U.) and Globalization and the Transforming Metropolis – Saskia Sassen (Columbia University)
• Day 1e: The Stratified City: Ethnographic and Demographic Challenges – Elijah Anderson (Yale) and Do Cities Need a Middle Class? – Joel Kotkin (Chapman University)
• Day 1f : Sustainability in Action: A Better Way, Ray Anderson, Founder and Chairman of Interface, Inc.
• Day 2a: Building Better Cities – Welcome and Opening Keynote – Strategies of Hope by Cameron Sinclair, co-founder and executive director, Architecture for Humanity
• Day 2b: Design Frameworks for Sustainable and Humane Cities – Gary Lawrence (ARUP) and David Crossley (Houston Tomorrow)
• Day 2c: Movement and Access – Catherine L. Ross, Georgia Tech, and Antanas Mockus, former Mayor of Bogotá
• Day 2d: Designing Ecocities – Ken Yeang, Llewelyn Davies Yeang, and Snapshots of Success: Urban Spaces -Fred Kent, Project for Public Spaces
• Day 2e – Planning for the Sustainable Metropolis – Lars G. Lerup (Dean of Architecture), Larry Beasley (City of Vancouver), Gary Lawrence (ARUP)
• Day 2f: After-Dinner Keynote: Majora Carter, Founder, Sustainable South Bronx
• Day 3a: Lifelines of the Sustainable Metropolis: Water, Infracture, and Hope (William J. Mitchell and Volker Hartkopf)
• Day 3b, The City’s Infrastructure: Solutions for the Present and the Future (cont.) – Alexander Zehnder (TWH Board) and Wayne L. Gordon (Lawndale Community Church) and Harvey Clemons Jr. (Pleasant Hill Ministries)

Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about a significant source of energy waste, one that burdens utility budgets, frustrates maintenance personnel, and ultimately leads to building occupants who are either too hot or too cold, but never just right.  This pernicious source of energy waste is over-design.

Over-design of heating and cooling systems is hard for me to visualize.  I am admittedly at a disadvantage in this discussion as like most campus sustainability professionals I am not a mechanical engineer by training.  Or an HVAC technician.  Or a controls technician.  Or an architect.  Or a contractor.  In fact, if you are looking for an expert on the subject, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Yet, I’m increasingly on the look-out for over-designed mechanical systems.  In a recently completed project for Rice, the MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) engineering consultant originally recommended 2,000 tons of cooling.  An internal team from Rice whittled this down to 300 tons of cooling – an 85% reduction.  To date, the building’s actual consumption has not peaked above 40 tons, although it eventually will.  The difference between the original recommendation and the actual peak from operations to date is a factor of 50.  That’s over-design!  As a comparison, when we wash our hands under a sink, the stream of water is typically flowing at a rate of 2.5 gallons per minute.  If this were over-designed by a factor of 50, the flow rate would be 125 gallons per minute, which is typical for a fire hose.  So again I ask the question, would you wash your hands with a fire hose?  Certainly not, and no consultant would recommend that we do so.  But when it comes to energy, we’ll get the equivalent of a fire hose to wash our hands if we’re not careful.

Over-designed mechanical systems are bad for a number of reasons.  To name just a few, they cost more up-front, and then also to operate.  They operate inefficiently, far outside of their optimal ranges, which shortens the lifespan of the equipment.  They are difficult for maintenance people to control (imagine trying to adjust the flow on that fire hose to fill a cup of water without spilling!)  And when the systems are hard to control, space temperatures will either be too cold or too hot, and the building occupants will suffer as a result.

So what’s a campus sustainability professional to do?  As I’ve noted in other posts on this blog, we can’t be experts in everything, but we can bring the conversation to a fundamental level that enables us to partially overcome our lack of technical experience and play to our strengths.  Following are a few tips:

• Enable the conversation. We operate horizontally in an organization of vertical silos.  Our job is all about making connections and facilitating communication between experts.  I recommend organizing one or several energy-focused conversations during the design of a new building.
• Get the system in the room. Think carefully about the different voices and skill sets that need to be at the table.  From your institution, this may include one or several maintenance representatives, an energy manager, a project engineer, and a project architect.  From your consulting team, the MEP consultant, the LEED consultant, the design architect, and so forth.  The full range of stakeholders need to be present.
• Gather benchmarking data. One of the best ways to ferret-out over-design is to gather operational data in either dollars per square foot or units of energy per square foot for comparable facilities.  If any of your campus buildings are individually metered (and hopefully most of them are!), then calculating annual energy consumption per square foot is easy and provides you with operational data for facilities that you can readily visualize.
• Apply diversity factors. This is a big one, and often you’ll have to know to ask this question.  For certain facilities, designs are created assuming that everything is in a worst-case scenario, with additional factors of safety layered-in.  Suppose your consulting team is designing a laboratory with fume hoods.  For the sake of design, they are likely to assume that all labs are in full use at all times with all fume hoods opened to their 100% position. In reality, this simply does not happen.  It’s not that they’re designing the equivalent of a church parking lot for the Easter service.  It’s that they’re designing the church parking lot as if Christmas, Easter, and Palm Sunday all happen on the same morning, with additional spaces provided in the event that the church might double its size at some future date.  The diversity factor is a multiplier that enables for a more realistic sizing of mechanical systems in recognition that a “worst x worst x worst x safety factor” scenario just doesn’t happen.  Consultants will be hesitant to even suggest a diversity factor to apply; you’ll have to do this legwork on your own.
• Set the parameters. The previous recommendations are often reactive.  In a sense, they’re a recipe for an intervention.  Ideally, you don’t want an intervention, you want right-sized systems as part of the original design.  One approach would be to gather benchmarking data prior to a project, establish a “do not exceed” figure for energy per square foot based on real operational data from your institution (or comparable), and then see if the consulting team has the discipline to stay at or below the target.

These steps will help the campus sustainability professional to orient a project team towards eliminating over-design.  As you step back to consider the system-wide impact of over-design, one on top of the other, from the upsizing of air handling units and pumps by a manufacturer’s salesperson to setting an excessive minimum number of air changes to assuming improper design temperatures to failing to apply diversity factors and on and on and on…. well, suddenly it’s not so hard to see why when it comes to energy, we do sometimes end up with the equivalent of washing our hands with a fire hose.  But as the era of cheap energy draws to a close, this will be one mistake that we simply cannot afford to keep making.

Over the last few years, a number of people have come to me seeking advice about green jobs.  Usually the inquiries have come from undergraduates, and they’ve historically come at a modest but steady pace.  The last few months have been totally different.  Yes, I’m still hearing from students – and a lot more students to be sure – but also from mid-career professionals who are ready to make a change, MBAs seeking a new direction, and young alums who don’t want to get locked-in to their current (non-green) paths.

I’m certainly not a trained career counselor, but there are a few things that I’d like to say to job-seekers and potential employers about green jobs.

• First, not all green jobs are born green.  Or, to put a different spin on it, one approach could be to “green” an existing “brown” job.  This is easy to say of course, and I certainly know from experience the difficulty of putting this into practice.  A number of years ago I worked as a water and sewer engineer for a utility, and I encountered a considerable amount of resistance and even some ridicule when I proposed that we initiate a series of water conservation programs.  Yet, times do change.  A few years after I left, the combination of population growth and a severe drought triggered a water emergency, and now that very same utility has a reasonably robust (although certainly not exemplary) water conservation program.  Certainly a lesson for greening an existing brown job would be to know when the time is right.

• Second, for recent graduates, inexperience in the workplace can be an advantage when they seek a green job, as it’s harder to unlearn a way of thinking than it is to learn it.  My former colleagues at the utility had to unlearn a way of thinking before they could see that reducing demand for water was just as important if not more so than simply adding supply.  I was inexperienced enough not to be burdened with their mental framing.  When I tell students that their inexperience can help them, I also add that some in their generation (not all, mind you, but some) think in systems and readily see connections in ways that quite frankly their parents’ generation does not.  I attribute this in part to the fact that these young adults were raised in a world of hyperlinks.  The ability to see connections without pre-existing frames will put any seeker of green jobs at an advantage.

• Third, a number of students will tell me that they’re planning to just “finish up” their major, and then they want to get a green job that’s presumably something completely different.  If they dislike their major, then that’s fine.  However, I do advise students to first think about whether they can leverage what they already know before they make a clean break.  Similarly, when someone with many years of professional experience tells me that they want to start over, the first thing I ask is to see their resume, which often reveals a set of experiences that if framed the right way can help make the next step to a green job easier than they might have otherwise thought.  I also remind them that young green companies need experienced hands to help them grow, which offers another point of entry.

• Fourth, if employers haven’t figured out by now that that this generation of students not only want green jobs but are demanding them, then they are missing out on a golden recruiting opportunity that can also help to transform their companies.  I know a lot of people with green jobs, and I would describe most of these people as being highly motivated and passionate about their work, as it gives them a sense of meaning and purpose in what they do.  What employer wouldn’t want to capitalize on that?  If I had to describe my colleagues when I worked as a highway engineer many years ago, well… motivated and passionate would not be amongst the words I would have selected.

So what new initiatives might those of us in the campus sustainability community undertake related to green jobs?  One possibility would be to partner with campus career services centers to host green jobs speakers and fairs, and to attract employers that offer entry-level green jobs to recruit at our campuses.  A second possibility of course would be to continue working to green existing brown jobs on our campuses.  A third suggestion is to provide opportunities for students to work part-time in some sort of campus green job, such as a dormitory eco-rep or sustainability office intern, so that they can gain experience prior to entering the workforce.  A fourth suggestion is to promote class projects that use the campus or neighboring community as a hands-on laboratory for learning about sustainability, which again provides students with tangible experience prior to graduation.  Finally, beyond our own campuses, another idea would be to include opportunities for potential employers to meet and interview sustainability-minded students at a future AASHE conference.  (The time is certainly ripe for some bright entrepreneur to launch a green version of Monster.com, which with apologies to Red Sox fans I’ll call “GreenMonster.com” but until that happens perhaps there’s a role for AASHE to play).

In closing, given everything I’ve already said, I will caution that at some point in time that is likely closer than we think, green jobs will just be known as jobs.  Remember ten years ago when the internet revolution spawned e-business?  I distinctly remember the then-dean of the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School noting as he launched a new initiative in e-business that before long, we wouldn’t be using the word “e-business” anymore.  The “e” would go away; it would just be business again, albeit something quite different than before.  He was right.  I think the same will hold true for green jobs.  There will still be jobs that are most certainly not green, but those that are will be so ubiquitous that we won’t find ourselves calling for them to be created by the millions.  The only trick is for us to figure out how to get there from here.

One such initiative is trayless dining. I co-teach a course each fall where students use the campus as a laboratory for learning about sustainability, and as part of the class requirements they work on group projects to improve the environmental performance of the university. When a group of my students decided that they wanted to implement a trayless dining pilot project last September, we initially viewed the initiative as primarily an environmental measure. We would soon discover that dropping the tray opened the door to a much broader web of benefits.

The problem is straight-forward. In dining halls that feature all-you-can-eat meals, people tend to put more food on their trays than they actually eat. And why not? When taking an additional food item carries no extra cost to the student, the incentive is to over-consume. The result is that a noticeable quantity of food ends up in the trash, and it’s this visible display of waste bound for a landfill that will stir-up environmentally-minded students.

In 2005, a group of my students worked on an educational campaign to reduce food waste in a campus dining hall. Using a test and control site, they found that those students at the test site who were targeted with a campaign of waste reduction messages in fact reduced their plate waste by 30%, while the students at the control site showed no change. In their final report, the student group thoroughly detailed the upstream environmental impacts avoided by not wasting food, as well as the downstream landfill issues. Curiously, over the course of the entire semester, we all missed an obvious accomplice to these wasteful activities, and it could not have been more visible: the tray.

My students last fall hypothesized that by removing trays from a dining hall, students would be more careful about their food selections. This would decrease food consumption and waste, as well as the energy and water used to clean the trays and extra plates. However, while they felt they could prove their hypothesis, they feared student backlash and staff opposition. An educational campaign was one thing, taking away trays and changing the operations of a dining hall was quite another.

Fortunately, over the years the class has become a bit of a safe haven for experiments. With the promise of faculty oversight of student work, several administrators have become comfortable with letting students in the class test new ideas. And indeed, our Housing and Dining (H&D) personnel were quite supportive of a pilot trayless dining project. However, they worried about student opinion. To address this, the students on the project team met with the elected leaders of two residential college (dormitory) governments and proposed four lunchtime trayless dining pilots in their shared dining facility spanning a four week period that would be called “Wasteless Wednesdays.” The college governments agreed, and the project was a go.

The first test date brought a mixed reaction. With the student project team on-hand to gauge opinion, they found that almost half of the impacted students were wildly supportive of the trayless dining concept, another 40% were vehemently opposed to it, and the final 10% were completely apathetic. Those of you who work on a university campus will instantly recognize the tendency for students to react strongly or not at all.

Back in the kitchen, the H&D staff reported that plate waste had dropped 30% (the same amount as had been achieved by the educational campaign in 2005), and that the use of water, energy, and cleaning chemicals to wash plates and trays had dropped by almost 10%. They were intrigued. On a typical day in this particular dining hall, they would spend about $1000 per lunch period on food costs, not including the labor for preparation or associated utilities. What if they could reduce the amount of food that they needed to prepare? And not just for lunch, but for dinner and breakfast too (which together cost about another $1,000 per day just for the food)?

The following Wasteless Wednesdays yielded similar results. Student opposition began to wane as the project team continued to listen to the concerns of their fellow students and to work with the staff to take steps to address them, such as moving a supply of flatware out into the dining area so that students didn’t have to balance it on their plates or make a separate trip just to get a fork and knife.

Following the successful pilot project, Housing and Dining staff approached the Rice Student Association (the “SA” is our campus student government) to begin a dialog about implementing trayless dining at all Rice dining halls for all meals. The SA adopted a resolution in February supporting the measure, which was endorsed by our student newspaper, and in March the trays were removed from all dining halls. To date, I am aware of only one complaint resulting from trayless dining at Rice.

Several lessons are clear from our early efforts with trayless dining at Rice:

• Experimentation! The ability to conduct a pilot project in a safe setting – through a class project – provided a level of comfort for both staff and students to engage in an experiment.
• Communication! Students in the dining hall appreciated that their concerns were heard – and in some cases addressed – during the pilot project, and further our student government reacted favorably to being engaged in discussions about supporting trayless dining rather than simply being notified that it would happen.
• Location! In any trayless dining effort, we have come to discover that the geography of the kitchen and dining hall are very important. The placement of flatware and drink dispensers for example can make trayless dining relatively easy or quite challenging.
• Education! As David Orr wrote in his famed essay “What is Education For?”, faculty and students should work together to study the wells, farms, feedlots, mines, and forests that supply the campus, as well as the places where the wastes are discharged or dumped, and then should participate in the creation of real solutions to these real problems. Trayless dining is one such example. This was an opportunity to create a teaching moment while also fostering student leadership skills.

We have come to discover that removing the tray is akin to removing a keystone, unleashing a variety of benefits. In addition to those already discussed, there are additional energy and labor savings related to reducing the quantity of food to be cooked. Arguably, trayless dining also improves the health of students by discouraging over-eating. I continue to hear from students that they pay more attention to the food that they consume now that the trays are gone.

As universities continue to look for savings opportunities, our experience at Rice echoes what others have also discovered. That is, if you want to save money and improve the environmental performance of your campus dining hall, perhaps the biggest and easiest step to take is to drop the tray.

The center of Ryon is a large open space filled with gigantic pieces of equipment for breaking things like steel bars and concrete beams. While there’s nothing aesthetically pleasing about it, there’s an inherent curiosity and coolness to the space that attracts one’s attention. As we walked past this central area towards the restroom, I couldn’t help but overhear a number of the students commenting to each other, “Wow, what is this place?”

What just happened? That one comment told me everything I needed to know about the level of interaction between architecture and engineering students on our campus. The architects had never been inside the civil engineers’ building, and I’m guessing the opposite held true as well. That’s two different buildings and two separate worlds for two professions that absolutely must become more familiar with one another if we are to create a more sustainable future.

One of the most challenging jobs for campus sustainability professionals is to thread the different worlds of the university together. I’m presently co-chairing a conference entitled “Transforming the Metropolis: Creating Sustainable and Humane Cities” where we’re trying to do exactly that by bringing together architects, urban planners, elected officials, civil engineers, environmental engineers, corporate executives, sociologists, community leaders, energy policy experts, faith community leaders, and many other disciplines and professions to address how an urban future can provide answers to our ecological, social, and economic challenges.

My role in part has been to see beyond the departmental and topical boundaries and to build connections. When planning the conference, there were pressures to compartmentalize the program, and to package the speakers into different tracks for different disciplines. And if left unchecked, there is a general tendency for each interest to just focus on their own preferred speakers, rather than to see a broader context. But the discussion of sustainability doesn’t fit into anyone’s box, and neither do discussions about cities. These topics demand to be handled in an interdisciplinary manner. And so we decided that all attendees regardless of background would hear the same speakers, and like it or not would be fully immersed in a number of topical worlds that might not be altogether familiar to them.

If you’ll allow me to digress for a moment, I would like to briefly describe the flow of the program (you can view the speaker bios here), and to invite any reader of this blog to register for this exciting and affordable event, which will be held on the Rice campus from March 2-4.

The first morning of the conference features a panel of mayors, representing Houston, Texas; Bogota, Colombia; Karachi, Pakistan; and Rehovot, Israel. For the first time in human history, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, so this conference envisions the city as holding the solution to our challenges for building a more sustainable and humane world (if done correctly, of course). The mayors will collectively illustrate progress and problems in their own cities in achieving this outcome. Following the panel is a discussion about the natural limits on our expansion by the originator of the ecological footprint William Rees, paired with a historical view of the human tendency to sprawl, by Robert Bruegmann. In the afternoon, we’ll address our future water and energy supplies with Perry McCarty and Amy Myers Jaffe, respectively. Next, we’ll turn our attention to globalization with Saskia Sassen, followed by discussions of demographics and the middle class with Elijah Anderson and Joel Kotkin. Ray Anderson of Interface, Inc. will close the evening by providing a striking story of sustainability and innovation in the corporate world.

Day two begins with strategies of hope from Cameron Sinclair, whose work in promoting design solutions to humanitarian crises has brought him to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast in recent years. Alejandro Guitierrez and David Crossley will present design frameworks for sustainable cities, followed by a discussion of movement and access by Catherine Ross and Antanas Mockus. In the afternoon, Larry Beasley, Peter Calthorpe, and Lars Lerup will address the topic of people, power, and planning. Fred Kent will share snapshots and lessons of successful urban spaces, and Ken Yeang will discuss designing eco-cities and eco-skyscrapers. The evening comes to a close with Majora Carter, whose work as the founder of Sustainable South Bronx led to her being recognized as a MacArthur Fellow.

The final morning of the conference delves into the present and future of the city’s infrastructure with Thomas D. O’Rourke and William J. Mitchell. Alexander Zehnder will offer thoughts on the future of water management, and finally Wayne Gordon and Pastor Harvey Clemons, Jr. will share their experiences on the role of communities of faith in building cities of hope.

But what happens on March 5^th, the day after the conference, when all of the attendees have gone home? Will our faculty and staff co-chairs and planning committee retreat to their separate worlds? Are the connections that we’ve been making ephemeral, or are they real? This will be the real test. In some respects, universities are highly conservative places, penalizing those who reach outside their departments or who take unconventional approaches to their scholarly pursuits (witness the struggles of the digital humanities community, for example). Further, the pace of change in the curriculum can be glacial.

However, at this moment in time, my gut tells me that this conference is an important and necessary step in spanning the often wide chasms between the disciplines on my own campus on issues of sustainability and the city. And if I’m lucky, perhaps within just a few years, when I lead students in the sustainable design class on a sustainability walking tour of campus, when we walk into the civil engineering building, I won’t have to hear “Wow, what is this place?” but rather “Hey, I love coming to this place!” Wouldn’t that be more appropriate in a building for a discipline known for bridge-building?

From my perspective, the visit by Mr. Pickens was not Rice’s lead energy policy headline for the day. That distinction is reserved for our university president, who sent an email to the entire Rice community announcing a Building Temperature Policy, outlining a series of tangible steps that members of our community can take to save energy, and calling for a broader culture of energy conservation on our campus. The Pickens event will garner media attention, enliven classroom discussions for the classes that attended, and perhaps even lead some students to focus their careers on energy. However, the Building Temperature Policy – as unglamorous as it sounds – is the real game changer.

Houston’s climate is quite similar to that of New Orleans or Tampa. That is, hot and humid. Air conditioning – providing relief from both the heat and humidity – was one of the technologies that enabled Houston (and the South for that matter) to grow into the major population and economic center that it is today. For years, locals used to boast that Houston was the “world’s most air conditioned city,” and anyone who has visited can attest that thermostats across this city are set to levels that are almost uncomfortably cold during our long, hot summers. It is not uncommon for women on our campus to wear sweaters indoors during the summer, and we even have instances where some employees use space heaters to counteract the aggressively cold air conditioning. We have taken a technology that has rendered our heat and humidity a mere inconvenience (rather than a threat to human life) and abused it. On our campus, air conditioning is our primary energy expenditure, and this is where we believe a lot of “low hanging fruit” can be found to cut our utility bills and reduce our carbon footprint.

In the 4+ years that I have worked as a campus sustainability professional, I have become involved in a variety of energy conservation efforts, from awareness campaigns to dorm energy competitions to design reviews to operational changes in facilities. There have been a number of successes along the way, mixed in with a healthy dose of frustrating moments (despite working with good, well-intentioned people). What I have come to conclude is that in absence of a comprehensive policy that outlines temperature settings, building hours, off-hour setbacks, and general expectations related to thermal comfort, we’d forever be acting in a piecemeal fashion, making adjustments here and there as time permitted, but never fully realizing the financial and environmental savings that would come with a comprehensive approach.

So why should it be so hard to create indoor conditions without a formal policy such that a worker doesn’t have to wear a sweater indoors when it’s 95 degrees and humid outside? In the absence of guidelines, the facilities personnel who actually set space temperatures are inclined to please their customers rather than conserve energy, and in doing so a space is often cooled to a level that satisfies the most heat-sensitive building occupant, as fewer people will complain about too much air conditioning than too little. Further, in the absence of guidelines, air conditioning schedules for buildings are gradually eroded as requests come in for off-hour (over-)cooling that are then never re-set, eventually leading to 24/7 over-cooling for an entire building. Facilities workers are busy and they want customers to be happy. If a customer demands that his office be cooled to 70 degrees instead of 76, why would the responding facility worker not make the change if no such policy existed to prevent it? And what if he took a conscientious stand and refused to make the change, but had no policy to fall back upon? That worker would likely be overruled.  And let us also not overlook that the customer, freed from the burden of paying their own energy bill in the workplace, will consume energy in ways that they wouldn’t dream of doing at home.

In his talk, Mr. Pickens made numerous references to the first 100 days of the Obama administration, and the need to enact a comprehensive national energy plan within that timespan. We’ll have our own first 100 days on campus as we begin rolling-out our building temperature policy, communicating with our campus community, and setting implementation processes and milestones. I see this as happening not a moment too soon. In this economic climate, universities need financial savings, and energy efficiency can be one of the ways to help keep universities strong. Imagine what even a 5% reduction in energy costs could do for your university? For us, that’s close to a million dollars. And rest assured that as soon as the economy recovers, the soaring energy prices that we witnessed in the first 8-9 months of 2008 will return.

This will be nothing compared to what’s further ahead. Quite chillingly, in his final remark during the question and answer session, Mr. Pickens noted in a rather off-hand way that we have perhaps 20-30 years worth of recoverable domestic natural gas reserves left, but that that’s enough of a bridge (and, in his view, the only available bridge) for us to cross as we race to develop new technologies to feed the energy demands of America. I suspect that crossing that bridge might take on the appearance of an Indiana Jones movie, as we race desperately to safety while the structure crumbles beneath our feet. Where does your campus’s power come from? We generate ours through natural gas fired cogeneration turbines, and we also purchase electricity from the grid that is generated in large part from natural gas. Clearly, we have long-term vulnerabilities and unavoidable challenges ahead. A building temperature policy is an important step, but ultimately each university will need to consider developing its own energy plan for the future. As Mr. Pickens joked, it’s better to be a fool with a plan than a genius with no plan at all.  Let’s hope that in academia, we’re geniuses with plans, because otherwise we’ll be nothing but planless fools.