New program to cut campus emissions
USU is implementing a new program in an effort to decrease carbon emissions.
Faculty and staff can now choose to donate $10 of their travel reimbursement checks to projects that promote sustainability on campus, said Nat Frazer, chairman of the USU Sustainability Council.
“We wanted it to be voluntary,” Frazer said. “We wanted it to be a tax-deductible donation to the university, and so we needed to work closely with the Controller’s Office and the Development Office to see if that could be done.”
After a trip and before a reimbursement is paid, faculty members can review the reimbursement form. If they so choose, faculty members can check a box to donate $10 of their reimbursement to the Carbon Offset Program, Merrill said.
“We just took a look at what we had as far as our travel and expense management system, and we decided how we could modify it to accommodate this type of contribution,” Merrill said.
Unlike other universities, USU is not buying carbon credits. People participating in carbon-emitting activities, such as flying in an airplane, can buy carbon credits to offset the emissions.
The carbon credit company will then plant trees to help soak up carbon dioxide, Frazer said. The catch is these trees aren’t planted locally, he said. The College of the Atlantic in Maine claims to have achieved zero carbon emissions, Frazer said, but it buys carbon credits that plant trees in Oregon, not helping Maine’s environment at all.
“We just made a commitment that we weren’t going to buy carbon credits,” Frazer said. “We started trying to figure out other ways that we might do it.”
Instead of using carbon credit companies, USU officials decided they wanted to keep efforts local, Frazer said. Donations will be used to make improvements at USU that reduce carbon emissions. Their first project is replacing gas lawn mowers with electric or propane mowers, which burn less carbon.
Future projects depend on the success of the program, Frazer said. The amount of money the program raises depends on how many faculty members choose to donate. He said he doesn’t know what to expect, but it could be up to $50,000.
“This is, in a way, an experiment to see how it’s going to work,” Frazer said.
The Controller’s Office processes about 20,000 travel authorizations per year, said Megan Maples, accounting assistant in the Controllers Office.
Every day, there are 200-300 travel authorizations in circulation, Merrill said.
Anyone who travels on school business, such as picking up a guest speaker from the airport, can be put into the reimbursement system, Maples said.
Because the Carbon Offset Program is completely voluntary, there is no way to know how successful the program will be, Frazer said.
“Come back in six months, and I’ll tell you how much we’ve got,” he said.
A former faculty member of the English department, Chris Cokinos, formulated the idea, but the creation of the program was a group task, Frazer said. Cokinos had the inspiration, Frazer took the idea to the president’s Executive Council and President Stan Albrecht came up with the faculty-friendly idea of putting a donation check box on reimbursement forms, Frazer said.
Maples, Ryan Merrill, the database administrator, and Sharyn Bradfield, the vice president for business and finance in the Controller’s Office, worked to implement the program, he said.
Over the course of the semester, the Sustainability Council will ask people for ideas on future projects, Frazer said. Purchasing carbon-efficient lawn mowers will cost $10,000-$20,000. After the money is raised, the council will look for new projects, he said.
“There are lots of different things we could do, but, my guess is, when we open this project up and ask people for ideas, they’ll come up with things we haven’t even thought of that are better than what we thought of,” he said.
A moderately expensive project is putting a green roof on the Merrill-Crazier Library, he said. Green roofs are built to house plants and can reduce heat inside buildings during summer, he added, which can double the life of the roofs.
The library was built to support a green roof, but plants and a necessary irrigation system weren’t funded with the building, he said. The project would cost $100,000-$200,000.
Frazer said Facilities has been working toward sustainable initiatives for years. They’ve replaced lightbulbs with florescent bulbs and retrofitted buildings to make them more energy efficient, and new buildings are built to be energy efficient, he said.
Facilities also waters the lawns with recycled water, and dining services eliminated trays in dining rooms to save water and reduce food waste, he said.
USU officials enacted the Climate Action Plan in 2010, a strategy to decrease carbon emissions to zero by 2050, Frazer said. Albrecht was the first university president in Utah to sign the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, and he was one of the first 100 in the nation, Frazer said.
Nationwide, 674 colleges have signed the climate commitment, he added.
Frazer said he credits the students for voting to increase their student fees to create their own sustainability office.
“This is the opportunity for the faculty and the staff to join the (Facilities) people and the students in being more sustainable,” Frazer said. “We’ve got the university operations. We’ve got the students on board. And so now the faculty and the staff can follow the good example that the students have set.”
Bradfield said she was most excited that the money earned from the program is staying in Cache Valley and not being sent across the nation.
“We hope it will contribute to a healthier, happier environment here in Cache Valley,” Merrill said.
“USU is pretty big in the valley, and if we can reduce our footprint, it will be beneficial to all the valley’s residents,” Merrill said.
—– marissa.shields@aggiemail.usu.edu