As the Green Revolution takes hold, and we finally begin to take responsibility for the well-being of the world around us and the resources it provides, students and faculty on campuses across the globe are chipping in to do their part. According to The Princeton Review’s Green College Honor Roll, there are eighteen schools across the United States that have scored 99, the highest grade possible, on their efforts to maintain a green, eco-friendly college campus environment, of which are described below.
- The Arizona State University at the Tempe campus has the largest assortment of energy-producing solar panels of all college campuses within the United States. ASU also has a School of Sustainability, established in 2007, which is the first of its kind in the US and challenges students and faculty to find practical resolutions for our country’s various environmental, social, and economic issues. The school also helps students and faculty with payment for bus and lightrail passes and offers a car-sharing program with the special incentive of prime parking.
- The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine has been carbon neutral since 2007 and attains this through its strict use of electricity from renewable hydropower and heat from renewable wood pellets. The campus receives much of its produce from a local organic farm, which is also partially powered by renewable energy from turbines that Atlantic students help to set up.
- At Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington has launched a new curriculum for the Bioregion, which is an effort to incorporate issues about the environment and sustainability into general education courses offered in colleges throughout the Pacific Northwest.
- In Atlanta Georgia, the Georgia Institute of Technology requires that all vendors selling products on their campus must provide only green products. They’ve insured using less water and less treatment chemicals through their cleaning equipment, which uses seventy percent less water and ninety percent less chemicals than the standard issued machines.
- The Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts has set a goal to reduce their emissions by thirty percent below a 2006 baseline by 2016, and they’ve already attained a fifty five percent recycling rate.
- Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts has been working to green its campus since the 1980s, and recently they’ve replaced over 70,000 standard lamps with florescent lamps which will cut carbon emissions down by 686 tons every year. Students and faculty initiated a “Project Clean Plate” program, which resulted in the composting of over 594 tons of left-over food in 2008.
- Students at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin are able to take an array of classes with environmental focuses ranging from Sustainable Business to Sustainable Agriculture. The campus has two wind towers, several solar panels, furniture made from recycled material, and uses geothermal hear to heat the campus center and libraries. The dining services offer sustainably-harvested seafood, free- range meats, and organically-grown, fair-trade foods.
- The State University of New York at Binghamton holds yearly energy conservation contests between dormitories, and the 2009 contest reduced electricity consumption overall by seven and a half percent. Every year the campus composts about 2,500 pounds of waste and recycles more than ninety percent of its service ware.
- Unity College in Unity, Maine attains one hundred percent of its energy from renewable sources, and its grounds are maintained using purely organic methods. The college also offers students green majors, like Sustainability Design and Technology and Adventure Education Leadership.
- University of California, Berkeley has already initiated over two hundred energy efficiency projects and offers its students over eighty academic degrees with environmental focuses. Through student efforts, campus energy consumption has been reduced by over 8.5 million kWh and water usage has been cut by three million gallons.
- University of California, Santa Barbara is home to the most LEED-certified buildings in the UC system and the campus has reduced its consumption of electricity by thirty one percent and its use of natural gas by twenty three percent.
- University of California, Santa Cruz is listed in the top ten by the EPA of green power purchasing colleges. The campus maintains an approximate seventy percent waste diversion rate and twenty percent of his energy comes from renewable energy sources.
- The University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia has aggressively attacked its levels of water usage, conserving water using rain gardens and installing-low level water fixtures throughout the school, and as a result, the campus has seen a thirty percent decrease in water use.
- At the University of Maine in Orono, Maine, free bikes are offered to faculty, students, and every passer-throughs in order to decrease the number of cars driven in and around the campus. Any new buildings constructed on the campus are forced to meet silver-LEED standards, and older buildings are being renovated to go green.
- The recycling rate at the University of Maryland, College Park has shot to an outstanding fifty percent in 2008, and each year the hosts a Green Job Fair to help students find careers in environmental sustainability.
- Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina was one of the first colleges in the US to institute an overall campus recycling program during the 1980s. Additionally, most of the food served in the campus dining halls comes straight from the school’s own organic farms and gardens.
- At the West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia food waste has been eliminated by forty-two percent and all of the let-over food is donated to various charities. They’ve reduced their energy consumption by twenty percent and have recycled more than 2,500 of waste.
- Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut has instilled solar and wind energy projects to provide the campus with sources of renewable energy. Moreover, the renowned campus leads the nation on research concerning climate change and other environmental issues.
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