Sustainability Training Session and Fourth Week!

Yesterday’s Training Session was on Sustainability, it was presented by my supervisor Rebecca. She gave us an overview of what ASU is doing, and what some of their goals are. It was interesting to hear all the information, and I would say I learned a lot. They focus on balancing the environment, economy, and society when it comes to thinking about sustainability, and with that in mind they came up with four long-term goals.

1.       Carbon Neutrality – they hope to run one-third of their campus buildings solely on solar energy by 2020. Currently they have a lot of solar panels across campus on top of buildings and parking garages, but have plans to install many more until they run out of room.

2.       Zero waste – both solid and water by implementing the 5 Rs: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, and Recycle.

3.       Active Engagement – get all of ASU’s students and faculty/staff involved

4.       Principled Practice – this area expresses how they are going to achieve their goals

They have really tried to put a great emphasis on sustainability in University Housing getting their Pro Staff, CA Staff, and Student Organizations involved. They have the three Ps: Purchasing, Practices, and Programming; all of which reflect things you can be doing to be more sustainable.

A cool thing that I learned about is Campus Metabolism, it is this website that produces information about each building on how much energy the building is using. Students can go to website and look at their residence hall they live in and if they make an effort to turn off their lights, and use less energy they can see the difference they are making on a month to month basis. They have hall competitions to see which hall can make their percentages decrease the most, and they have worked out well. They are working towards getting all their buildings on campus connected to this website.

This was a good session and there was time to share what our campuses are doing so I heard other ideas from Missouri State, San Diego State, Florida International University, Central Michigan, and Utah State.

My fourth week is going great! I have been following up with vendors over the phone and through email and have been preparing to do some vendor outreach in Downtown Phoenix on Friday.