CU Making Universities Green (With Envy)

What’s something you can do to save the planet? You can stop drinking bottled water for one. Or you can always skip the elevator and use the stairs. Or of course, there’s dressing up like a Spartan and running around collecting people’s recycling.

Here at the University of Colorado at Boulder Environmental Center, people do a lot of crazy things to keep this planet green. Just ask Associate Director Marianne Martin, who’s been with the Environmental Center for 11 years now.

“Guerilla marketing is getting great attention. As far as getting people to think about their trash, it’s really quite effective,” says Martin. A CU graduate, Martin has seen it all, from the “Milk Carton Spartan” helping with a national collegiate contest called “recyclemania” to the center’s CU Bike Program, which this week has staged crash dummies around campus to simulate irresponsible cyclists. There’s a lot on her plate, and that’s just the way it should be.

“We want to help CU to be the most sustainable campus that it can be, not for the recognition, but to change the culture on campus,” Martin states. Some of the efforts of the Environmental Center to attain this goal include multiple partnerships on campus as well as within the city of Boulder.

Martin states, “Really all of our programs act as partnerships; you can’t really do anything alone.” These include the CU athletics department, in which the two coordinate zero-waste football games, Parking and Transportation, which provides the student buss pass (this has grown from 300,000 users to 1.5 million since its inception 6 years ago), and the CU Bike Program station, which gets 300 visits a day.

The success of these efforts has not gone unnoticed. Martin proudly says that this year Sierra Club has named CU the greenest university in the nation. Perhaps this comes as a result of its alternative energy (the solar array on top of the University Memorial Center provides more power than the Environmental Center uses), decreased energy consumption campus wide, or a diversion rate—how much trash is diverted from the landfill to recycling—of over 30%, to name a few. Martin recognizes the importance of effective programming.

“I don’t think we’d be getting a Sierra Club rating if it was just a bunch of programs on paper. It has to be real, with strong participation numbers,” she says.

But it’s more than a couple of solar panels that makes CU’s sustainable efforts so successful. Without the people, the energy—no pun intended—would dissipate.

“The push from students is what really makes it happen,” says Housing and Dining Promotions Coordinator Casey LeFever. Described as “above average for a student-oriented center,” the CU Environmental Center is almost entirely run by students, from volunteers to those who sort the recycling at the Intermediate Processing Facility, states Martin. Even the center’s $1 million budget comes from student fees, because it’s part of the student union.

However, other universities aren’t so advanced in their green efforts.

“Michigan State just started their program and got their students organized last year,” states LeFever. CU established its current center in 1970 and is used as a model for colleges across the nation, according to LeFever.

“The level our students are at is so much more forward,” he says.

With so many big ideas, it might seem intimidating to visit such ambitious people. But upon entering the Environmental Center, tucked upstairs in the University Memorial Center, one is surprisingly at home. The furniture is comfy and made of recycled materials, there’s a bowl of handpicked berries on the front desk, and people are pulling objects out of the trash to make jewelry.

“One time I was in there, someone had taken a bunch of old computer paper and sewn it together with old yarn to make notebooks,” LeFever says.

From old computer paper, to bright and innovative minds, nothing goes to waste at this Environmental Center.

It’s only a matter of time before the idea catches on.