MU representatives attend sustainability conference

The conference looked at reducing the carbon footprint of universities.

By Sarah Moore

Published June 29, 2009

The Rocky Mountain Institute and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education partnered with MU and other universities to work through the barriers of climate change mitigation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions on campus.

RMI and AASHE worked together and narrowed down their selections based on which schools could teach them the most. Fifty schools originally applied, and 11 were chosen.

RMI said it wanted a wide variety of schools — some liberal arts colleges, some community colleges, schools with different geographic ideas and large research universities, such as MU.

"It's a three-step process, which started with the researchers coming to the campus in February to see what was going on," former Sustain Mizzou President Pat Margherio said. "We then went with 11 other schools to the RMI to talk about the barriers of climate change with organizations like Second Nature and other sustainability groups."

The schools came together during the first week of June in Denver to talk about the ideas they had been working on since being chosen.

During the collaborations, school representatives discussed different proposals on how to make a more carbon-friendly campus and to make the campus and its students more aware of their energy consumption.

"Solar installations, metering usage on campus to measure how much energy a building is using and implementing a permanent revolving loan fund started from an initial grant, built by the campus from reinvesting savings from campus energy efficiency and conservation projects, so that savings could pay for future climate mitigation projects," said Sally Deleon, a member of the RMI research team.

Although all the proposals could bring enormous benefits to both the university and the environment, MU has already begun to conserve energy on campus. According the MU Campus Facilities Web site, the MU Power Plant, which utilizes a process called combined heat and power, produces energy at twice the efficiency rate of a conventional power plant.

Because the energy conservation program began in 1990 the campus has lowered its energy cost by $4.3 million a year. The building space has grown by 28 percent since the start of the program and energy usage has been reduced by 12 percent per square foot.

After meeting in Denver, the representatives went back to their respective schools to decide how they were going to make their campuses more carbon-neutral.

Former Sustain Mizzou President Ben Datema already implemented the Mizzou Dashboard program to educate students of their energy usage. This program allowed students living in Hatch, Schurz and College Avenue to participate in a competition to keep their residence hall as energy efficient as possible and monitor their energy consumption online.

The RMI issues a grant anywhere from $35,000 to $50,000 and Sustain Mizzou plans on using this grant to educate the campus, specifically by expanding the Mizzou Dashboard program into 10 more buildings.

"We plan on teaching students and making them aware of their energy emissions," Datema said. "Mizzou Dashboard is the visual tech aspect of our proposal. We also plan on using posters, T-shirts and week long activities to educate them on how to conserve their energy and how to use more sustainable practices."