A dozen or so Homewood students rummaged through
bloated trash bags sprawled on the busy
Keyser Quadrangle last Thursday in search of recyclable
quarry: newspapers, bottles, cans and
plasticware.
They took time out on a picture-perfect fall
afternoon to rescue a few bags' worth of materials
that would otherwise be bound for a local landfill. While
relatively small in scale, the very visible
"Dump on the Quad" served to highlight the message that
every bit helps, a mantra that Johns
Hopkins students are clearly buying into these days.
The event, organized by Students for Environmental
Action, was part of Green Week, a slate of
events intended to promote the efforts of the Johns
Hopkins Sustainability Initiative. The week also
cast a spotlight on the number of student-led efforts
currently under way to greatly improve Johns
Hopkins' environmental profile.
Davis Bookhart, manager of Energy Management and
Environmental Stewardship in the Office
of Facilities
Management, said that student involvement has been a
key element in the increased
greening of Johns Hopkins. Bookhart, who joined JHU in
2006, was charged with developing
sustainability initiatives that conserve electricity, curb
water usage and encourage recycling, while
also creating a general level of excitement about
ecological initiatives at the campuses.
"Our students have been an endless stream of ideas
that we've been able to harness, and we try
to do our best to support their efforts," Bookhart
said.
One such effort was the Green Idea Generator, which
debuted in fall 2007 and got a repeat
performance on Friday. The premise of the generator is to
allow students to brainstorm projects that
would improve sustainability at Johns Hopkins. It serves
to match interested students with faculty
experts and Facilities Management staff who could identify
meaningful new projects that can be
implemented, optimally, within one school year.
Roughly 60 people convened last November for the
kick-off brainstorming session in which a
dozen ideas for making the Homewood campus more
sustainable were introduced, discussed, refined
and gauged for level of interest. The two projects chosen
were a paper reduction campaign and an
endeavor that proposes to collect used waste vegetable oil
produced at campus dining facilities and
burn it in multifuel waste-oil burners in the Wyman Park
complex power plant.
Bookhart said that even ideas that didn't make the
cut had merit. "One group of students
proposed putting turbines in Homewood building downspouts
that would create electricity when it
rained," he said. "Now, I don't know if that is practical
at all, but it's just another example of their
creativity when it comes to tackling these issues."
On Wednesday, Green Week featured the Johns Hopkins
Green Festival, which brought
together several student environmental groups for an
information session in the Glass Pavilion. One
such group is EARTH, the Energy Activity Reduction Team at
Hopkins.
EARTH's signature event is the Saving Energy Extreme
Inter-dorm Tournament (SEX:IT), in
which residence halls compete based on their total energy
use, which includes electricity and natural
gas. The residence that reduces its energy consumption by
the greatest percentage from its baseline
wins. The winner of the inaugural event, held last spring,
was McCoy Hall, which reduced its electricity
use by nearly 40 percent.
Alexia Simonnard, president and founder of EARTH,
said that all but one residence hall
significantly reduced their energy consumption. The group
plans to host the tournament annually as a
constant reminder that students need to do the little
things, like turning off the lights when leaving a
room or unplugging appliances that continue to draw
electricity even when they're not being used.
Simonnard said that the student-based "green message"
has resonated with undergraduates.
"With the dorm competition, I was able to recruit
people I knew who then passed on the word
to others. We advertised some, but mostly it spread by
word of mouth," said Simonnard, a junior
public health major. "Students clearly respond to each
other."
Bookhart said that he realized when he took the job
that students needed to play a big role in
the university's greening initiatives. As one of his first
measures, he developed the ECO-Rep program
that allows Homewood freshmen to get involved with
sustainability-related actions through focused
activities, such as monitoring an ongoing recycling
program.
Each September, the program selects up to 10 freshmen
to become ECO-Reps for the school
year. The participants attend weekly seminars and then as
a team develop one environment-friendly
activity per month. They also create posters, fliers and
other materials to hang in the residence halls
and distribute around campus to increase environmental
awareness.
Katie Chekan, one of the student organizers of Green
Week and an intern with the Johns
Hopkins Sustainability Initiative, said that students take
the environmental call to action very
seriously.
"It's a big issue, and there are simply a lot more
reasons to want to help these days," said
Chekan, a junior international studies major. "Students
see rising gas prices, the threat of global
warming, and want to do something. They also see the
economic benefits of promoting and growing
green industry, and many of us want to be involved with
that."
For more information on the university's
Sustainability Initiative and student efforts, go to:
www.sustainability.jhu.edu.
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