What’s it like going green on a large university
campus? Ask Megan Zanella-Litke. She has been the sustainability coordinator
at the University of Richmond for the last two years. I recently met with Zanella-Litke to talk about where
she sees the school going in the future, and the challenges to working
with so many students and faculty members. For more information on the University of Richmond's sustainability efforts, check out their website.
Ace: How long have you been working as the sustainability
coordinator?
MZL: I’ve been at University of Richmond for two
years. I came here from Massachusetts
where I was volunteering at U Mass Dartmouth and their sustainability
program. Before that, I did a little bit
of work in the New Orleans recovery school district just for a short time, volunteering
to help them get recycling started because, after Katrina, recycling went away
in the entire city. I was there creating
programming for both the elementary school and high school students, and for
the teachers. They didn’t have recycling
at home either. You had to educate the whole spectrum.
Ace: Tell me a little about what you do as sustainability
coordinator. What’s a typical day
like? Is there a typical day?
MZL: That’s a tough question. I don’t think there’s a typical day. It’s a broad job. I work with faculty, staff, and students on
all different kinds of projects. I work
closely with facilities, looking at what they’re doing for energy efficiency on
campus, looking at what we’re doing with new buildings, or what we’re doing
with modifications to existing buildings, construction projects. We look at
water use and electricity use, seeing where there are opportunities for us to
continue to improve. I work really
closely with them on lots of different projects, and I work with student groups
on projects that they want to do on campus. I work with them in a couple different
capacities. We have interns that work on
LEED applications for the university. They
get to work with me and facilities on those projects. I have interns that help with just different
projects on campus. They help to track
the university’s emissions, pulling all that information together so that we
can figure out how we’re doing each year.
Then with the student groups, I just help them with whatever programming
they want to run, whether it’s having a waste audit or if they want to work on
a competition between the residence halls to see who can reduce the most
energy.
Ace: That sounds fun.
MZL: Yeah, and with staff we have programming for them so
that the individual offices can work to help the university achieve its larger
goals. We have a green office program
that twenty-six different offices are currently involved in. It’s only a year
old, so it’s been a really exciting program.
Lots of offices have gotten involved, and they have to complete check
lists. Each check list gets more
difficult and more involved. It
essentially starts with things like, we’re going to make sure all of our electronics
in our office are turned off when everybody goes home at night, and then gets
to bigger things like reviewing processes that are in there and seeing where
you can eliminate material use during a process.
Ace: Is it difficult promoting sustainability on such a big
campus?
MZL: It comes with a lot of different challenges since there’s
such a wide variety of people. There are
people who’ve been here for a really long time, there are new people. Students are constantly changing. There are people who already know the
institution really well who have one perspective, and then there are people who
are constantly new to learning the institution.
Both groups provide a lot of helpful information and are really great
groups to work with, but it creates challenges in having to program a little
differently for students versus staff who’ve been here a long time, or will be
here a long time. It makes so you have
to have a wide variety of programming.
Ace: Where do you see U of R going in the future with
sustainability?
MZL: I think each year we’ve made huge improvements and
huge changes. It’s a really exciting
place to be as….the university is really embracing sustainability and ready to
take the next step. I see it growing
into being part of the culture here and I think I’ve already seen that in a lot
of instances where people in different offices are starting to think through
things a little bit differently. We have
an office supply exchange. People in
offices are able to bring their surplus supplies that they’ve been stocking up,
or if they had extra things left over from a conference. They can drop them off and other offices can
pick them up for free. It’s been really
nice to see offices who now call me before they place an order just to check to
see if I have it.
Ace: Is there anything that you want people to know about the
sustainability effort at U of R?
MZL: I think we’re really excited that we’ve made a big
transition to get off of coal. We’ve
switched completely to natural gas as our main fuel source on campus, which is
a really nice next step after coal. I
think that’s the biggest accomplishment of the last twelve months. That was driven by student group efforts and
a lot of administrative and staff and faculty support. It was great that it was able to be a reality
and that were able to make that transition.
