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University of Florida 2006 Campus Sustainability Achievement Award Application

Category

Four-year and graduate institutions over 10,000 student FTE

Contact

Dedee DeLongpre
Director, Office of Sustainability
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL
(352)392-7578
dedee@ufl.edu

Governance & Administration

The University of Florida inaugurated its first fully funded Office of Sustainability on February 1, 2006. The university’s ad hoc sustainability task force officially evolved into a joint standing committee of the faculty senate on August 15, 2006. These two milestones are the culmination of more than a decade of student, faculty, and administrative commitment to sustainability on campus. The President of the university created and funded the office following resolutions from both the faculty and student senates.

Sustainability Committee

UF’s sustainability committee is composed of faculty members elected by the faculty senate, faculty or staff appointed by the President's designee, and student members selected by the dean of students. The director and an academic officer appointed by the provost serve as nonvoting ex-officio members.

The committee’s role is to promote sustainability within the university and with the larger community and to enhance the university's standing as a global leader in sustainability. It assesses the progress of the university's sustainability efforts and pursues their implementation when appropriate. It aids in the development of policy with the Office of Sustainability.

The sustainability committee has developed three task forces to address goals within the university. Following are the missions of those task forces.

• Zero Waste by 2015: to assess the university’s solid waste streams and to suggest policies and create user incentive programs to dramatically reduce solid waste on campus to nearly zero by the year 2015.
• Energy and Climate Change: to assess the energy system of the university, including the supply and consumption sides, for the purpose of minimizing both energy costs and environmental impacts in order to recommend measures to accomplish these goals.
• Education and Research: to facilitate ideas and methods in order to integrate sustainability into the research and educational fabric of the university, using the university as a living laboratory for sustainability research and education.

Office of Sustainability

The mission of the Office of Sustainability is to make UF - in its operations, education, research, and outreach - a model of sustainability, integrating the goals of ecological restoration, economic development, and social equity.

In pursuing this mandate, the office encourages and facilitates the collaborative efforts of faculty, students, and staff to generate knowledge, acquire skills, develop values, and initiate practices that contribute to a sustainable, high quality of life on campus, in the state of Florida, and across the globe.

The office supports faculty, students, and staff in assuming leadership to transform the university’s fourteen guiding principles for sustainability into practices.

Organizational memberships

The University of Florida is a member of AASHE. The Director of the office serves on the boards of AASHE and the Council for Sustainable Florida.

Faculty and administrative leaders at the university are bringing their institutional expertise in sustainability to their professional organizations. Additionally, UF departments have hosted several sustainability-related conferences this year. The Florida chapter of APPA hosted its statewide conference at the university in 2006; UF Physical Plant staff facilitated a track on sustainability in university operations. UF also hosted this year’s Florida USCGB conference: GreenTrends.

Operations

Energy and Buildings

The university has adopted LEED-silver criteria for design and construction for all major new construction and renovation projects to deliver high performance and sustainable building design.

The Campus Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places; the university is committed to preservation of the campus in a manner that meets its goals for energy efficiency.

Food and Dining

Since the early 1970’s, the university has administered organic garden plots on campus. These 75 plots are cultivated by some 100 faculty, staff and students year round.

The university is working with its dining services provider, ARAMARK, to develop an action plan for implementing principles of sustainability into food service operations, including regional sourcing of food, green catering, waste management and diversion, energy conservation, transportation impacts, sustainable procurement, and communication and marketing.

Parking and Transportation

The EPA has named UF one of the best workplaces for commuters among colleges and universities: a national list of innovative college and university employers committed to improving air quality, saving energy and reducing traffic congestion while improving quality of life for employees.

The university has committed to purchasing only hybrid or alternative fuel vehicles, whenever possible. The purchasing department maintains a listing of available vehicles to assist departments with choosing a vehicle for purchase. Additionally, the university stocks biodiesel and E85 ethanol for use in its fleet vehicles.

Land Use

In 2005 the university achieved designation as an Audubon International Cooperative Sanctuary. Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Programs promote ecologically sound land management and the conservation of natural resources through education and certification programs that are tailored to a diversity of land uses.

Purchasing

The university has instituted a sustainable purchasing policy to support the purchase of products that will minimize any negative environmental or societal impacts of university operations. UF recognizes that the purchasing decisions of its employees can make a difference in favor of environmental quality and the fair and equitable treatment of workers worldwide.

Waste

UF, through waste reduction and recycling initiatives, achieves a waste recovery rate of nearly 40%. Using a mixture of in-house and contracted resources, the University recycles over 6,500 tons of material annually. Additionally, UF strives to recycle at least 70% of its deconstruction debris.

To assure that equipment that could create environmental contamination is properly managed, UF established an Electronics Reuse/Recycling Policy as well as an accompanying step-by-step guide for disposal and recycling.

Water

UF’s three million gallon a day Water Reclamation Facility enabled the shift from well and potable water to reclaimed water for irrigation. With the exception of some distal areas, over 90% of the University’s campus is served by the reclaimed water system.

Social Equity

The University of Florida has set aggressive hiring and retention goals to ensure the university reflects society’s racial, ethnic and gender diversity. UF also strives to ensure that all personnel are rewarded with a livable wage and benefits, including benefit packages for spouses and domestic partners of university employees. The university seeks to ensure that contractors affiliated with the university meet or exceed the wage policy established for university employees. Beginning with the fall semester of 2006, the university’s fulltime graduate students will be offered health insurance.

Curriculum & Research

The University of Florida has a long-standing commitment to scholarly inquiry and the cross disciplinary academic training that defines the field of sustainability. Beginning with the pioneering systems ecology work of Dr. H.T. Odum in the 1970s, faculty members and students have made substantial contributions in fields as diverse as solar energy, community design, wetlands renewal, and public health. Since the late 1990s these research groups’ efforts have been supplemented by programs targeting a full range of sustainable scholarship, from the education of individual undergraduate students to the development of campus-wide research initiatives.

The provost has signaled her support of an academic focus on sustainability by creating a Provost’s Fellowship in Sustainability, to be funded through her office. The Fellow will work with her to connect UF’s rich and diverse current course and research offerings.

As a top-tier research and land grant university, UF is uniquely positioned to combine its research capacity with its outreach and extension mission to develop interdisciplinary institutes and programs that deliver important research science to the public.

The Water Institute, formalized in 2006, brings together research efforts in more than 50 existing programs to improve understanding of the physical, chemical, and biological processes in aquatic systems. Its mission is to enhance understanding of how human activities and attitudes affect aquatic systems and to develop and promote the adoption of improved methodologies for water management and policy development.

Additionally, the development of institutes for Integrative Land Use and Alternative Energy is underway. State government officials regularly seek advice from faculty in these interdisciplinary programs to inform policy for the sustainability of the state.

The McGuire Butterfly Pavilion serves a similar role. Completed in 2004 as part of the Florida Museum of Natural History, it is home to the second largest collection of butterfly specimens in the world and a world class exhibition of living butterflies. The museum’s program teaches the public about the importance of these sentinel creatures in monitoring the quality of the planets ecosystems. The research and collections mission of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity serves to focus the work of a number of scientists from across campus that seek to understand butterflies and to protect them from development threats in increasingly urbanized environments.

Beyond research efforts, talented and committed undergraduate students are the great strength and pride of the University of Florida. Over the past decade, committed faculty members have introduced students to sustainability in a variety of ways, including semester-long lecture series. The first several series, entitled “Conversations in Sustainability” fostered interest in and knowledge about sustainability. In 2005 the series was formalized as an interdisciplinary undergraduate class entitled “Facets of Sustainability.”

UF currently offers more than 100 courses that emphasize a thread of sustainability, some of which are organized into graduate or undergraduate concentrations, such as those in Building Construction, Environmental Engineering, and Architecture. With the guidance of the sustainability committee, the provost has commissioned a study of all existing coursework and degree offerings, with the goal of amplifying current strengths and finding new opportunities for student engagement in this important discipline.

Community Service and Outreach

Like other elements of the University of Florida’s sustainability efforts, community outreach is simultaneously widespread and focused. Three avenues for outreach have proved most successful to date. First, local conferences, exhibits, performances, and storefront clinics are visible gateways which allow the larger local and state communities to engage UF’s sustainability resources. Second, individual students work within the local community, providing service as part of coursework or in conjunction with extra-curricular activities. Third, academic programs provide enrichment to underserved portions of the local and state communities through grants and state appropriations. UF’s agricultural extension service is a particularly powerful example of the latter outreach avenue. Examples of each type of outreach follow:

The university is currently planning a statewide conference to be hosted on October 25-26 to coincide with national Campus Sustainability Day. The conference, titled “Campus and Community Sustainability: Sharing Best Practices and Visions for Florida’s Future” will focus on UF’s practice of using the 2000 acre campus as a living laboratory, and will also provide opportunities for members of the state’s higher education community to share best practices. The conference will focus on establishing stronger relationships between institutions and their communities, and emphasize the role of higher education in creating a more sustainable future. With the goal of empowerment through distributed leadership, UF has asked the Council for Sustainable Florida to take the lead in identifying a host campus for this annual statewide conference in following years.

Service learning opportunities which our students engage through coursework, as individuals, or through clubs, not only prepare students to address issues of social equity, environmental protection, and economic development in the future, but also engage them in a real-world setting in which they observe and work to address some mix of these issues.

A program to support service learning at UF exists within the Center for Leadership and Service, which helps introduce students to the value of community service and service learning opportunities, provides information to students on existing opportunities, and supports faculty in developing new service learning courses by connecting them to community contacts and current faculty teaching such courses.

Students working through the Office of Service Learning provided over 175,000 hours of service in the Gainesville community during the past academic year. The Office maintains a database of current service learning courses and syllabi, consults on logistical, risk management, and troubleshooting issues as needed, and provides classroom presentations and sessions on reflective learning as requested.

Institutional outreach also occurs through academic programs. The University of Florida is the state’s land grant institution, and thus has the opportunity to provide outreach across the state. Each of the state’s 60 counties has an extension office, and many provide education and research benefits which focus on sustainable agriculture. In addition, targeted educational outreach is promoted by, among others, the College of Education, which partners with under-performing local elementary schools, and the College of Engineering, which works through grant-funded faculty to introduce children from low income families to the fields of science and engineering.

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