The Board of Trustees have approved DU IMPACT 2025 and the Sustainability Council is now continuing with its strategic plan.
There is quite a force of change makers at DU with various plans underway. The Sustainability Council is moving ahead and making changes to the way our campus becomes more sustainable.
It’s 8:30 am in the loft of Anderson Academic Commons. The council slowly trickles in over the span of the next 10 minutes.
A woman introduces herself and the council and launches into updates. This woman is Becky Powell, a professor in Geography & the Environment here at DU and serves as chair of the council.
Becky Powell, a Geography & Environment professor at DU heads the Council of Sustainability.
http://www.du.edu/nsm/departments/geography/facultyandstaff/powell_rebecca.html
The room is filled with three types of people: professors decked out in their best grey suits and dress shirts, eager looking grad students ready to contribute, and a junior who is the head of Divest (an undergrad club).
Goals
A really important goal is to have DU eventually move away from using fossil fuels. While the council acknowledged that this isn’t the simplest goal to achieve, they will make a positive impact on campus on the road to doing so. Cheever, professor at DU, is leading the discussion part of the meeting. The council is setting about creating and completing tasks as part of their plan for the next year. One of their goals is to create more classes that incorporate sustainability in them, ”a university wide sustainability outcome is a good idea…we hope this will move us forward in developing more sustainability courses.”
https://www.flickr.com/photos/97513256@N06/9044197386
photo credit goes to Olearys
Challenges
They have already worked on implementing proper compost and recycling practices all around campus and in buildings. However, they have faced numerous challenges. ”The biggest challenge for us is to somewhat talk across the lines,” they aren’t communicating well with the student body and need to figure out how to fix that says one of the undergrad students. “It’s not the fact that there are multiple disciplinary people working on it isn’t enough, people need to work together,” commented David Carlson, a teacher at Korbel, with this in mind they have made sure that at every meeting there is a member of the undergrad Divest club present.
To bridge this gap and to reach the undergraduate community, a member of the club Divest always shows up to the meetings in order to relay the information and keep everyone up to date on what is going on, on our campus.
What does the future hold?
The council has made hockey a Zero Waste Event, “we are also trying to expand it out to more sports” said Martins, a grad student at DU. Lacrosse is the next sport they’re trying to make a Zero Waste Event. Zero waste means to divert as much trash as possible into compost instead of a landfill. They’ve worked with hockey players, students, and Sodexo to do that, and it’s worked extremely well for hockey so they are confident they’ll be able to push zero waste onto lacrosse games as well.
DU Hockey games goes zero waste
Green transportation is another project the council is working towards. They have had previous success with bike to work/campus days and want to continue pursuing this opportunity. They are exploring different bike sharing options such as Zagster and Gotcha Bike, as well as the possibility of a shuttle with a notification app.
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