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Pomona Completes Extensive Sustainability Audit
To plan for the future, Pomona spent the summer examining every inch of its campus to assess where it’s at in the green scheme of things.
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An effort that had six students combing every square inch of the campus this summer has come to fruition with the publication of Pomona’s first comprehensive sustainability audit, a 750-plus page report that will guide the College’s sustainability efforts.
The audit is the first step in creating a broader Sustainability Action Plan for the College over the next year. “The information [gathered] allows us to better understand our strengths and weaknesses, and to target something as specific as a particular building, room or even piece of equipment for improvements or retrofits,” explains Sustainability Coordinator Bowen Patterson ’06. “This document allows us to much more easily see where we are now and what we need to do to move forward.”
As part of Pomona’s membership in the
American College & University Climate Commitment, an
organization committed to eliminating global warming
emissions and integrating sustainability into curricula, the College is required to complete a greenhouse gas emissions audit. However, Pomona decided to create a much broader audit, including data on all energy use (electric, natural gas, transportation, lighting and renewable), water (plumbing, landscaping and storm water) use, waste (solid waste generation and recycling), and paper and housekeeping supply use, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions.
To complete this extensive audit, both student workers and a consulting firm, CTG Energetics, were enlisted to gather and analyze data. “We needed the consultants’ expertise to get the document completed, [but] there’s no way we would have been able to do something so broad without the student team,” says Patterson. “The students were able to play a key role in Pomona’s sustainability efforts, and gained a lot of valuable experience that they’ll be able to draw on and market when looking for jobs or getting into graduate school. It [also] allowed us to complete an audit with a breadth that would normally be prohibitively expensive when done by consultants alone.”
The students were trained by CTG in on-the-ground auditing. They cataloged every piece of lighting and plumbing, every square inch of landscaping and every building envelope (the exterior, which includes things that affect interior temperature like window gaps and coatings, and tree shade). The consulting firm then analyzed the data (historical use patterns, growth projects, use for specific buildings, etc.), summarized Pomona’s environmental impact and offered a list of possible sustainability strategies.
“We really got to see the ‘underbelly’ of campus,” says Zack Mirman ’11, a double major in environmental analysis and biology who worked on the study after being told about it by Charles Taylor, professor of chemistry and chair of the Sustainability Committee. “We saw all the inner workings of maintenance, housekeeping, faculty and staff. We explored every nook and cranny on campus, and got a full understanding of a variety of sustainability issues on campus.”
For Michael Larsen ’10, the experience was vital for his exposure to a career opportunity he hadn’t previously known about. “The knowledge and skills that we learned in our training are in high demand on the job market, and firms across the country offer entry-level positions doing work very similar to what we did this summer,” says Larsen, an environmental analysis major on the policy track. “For me, that’s worth more than our summer pay.”
Kevin Graf ’09, Tara Ursell ’08, Cecilia Viggiano ’08 and Caitlin Guthrie ’08 also worked on the audit, and Professor Taylor reports that the three recent graduates have all landed jobs in the sustainability field.
The Audit presented many findings of both immediate and long-term changes (like solar power) that can be made on Campus to improve sustainability. For example, low-flow shower heads would save 1.6 million gallons of water each year and have a payback of six years. More efficient sink faucets would save 673,000 gallons annually and take just a year for a return on the investment.
While 70 percent of campus lighting is already using fluorescent bulbs, making the complete switch would save 10 percent of our energy use for lighting. Occupancy sensors for bathroom lights would save three percent each year. “Those numbers sound small, but the pay-back periods on these technologies would be so short that it just makes sense to do them,” says Patterson.
By understanding all of the campus’s environmental impacts, the College is better able to change behavior, which is in line with the overall sustainability goals—to reduce consumption, rather than purchase offsets or credits. As President David Oxtoby explained to the
New York Times in July: “It’s too cheap, it’s too easy [to purchase credits]. The actual hard work is more expensive, but it actually does something.”
“The audit, our new position of sustainability coordinator, and resources going towards the
Sustainability Action Plan are all evidence of the school putting its money where its mouth is,” says Larsen. “This is a truly exciting time for sustainability at Pomona.”
The Pomona College Sustainability Audit is
available for viewing on the new
Sustainability website.
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