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PHOTO BY MEGHAN ERKKINEN

SUSTAINABILITY. The first-ever South Sound Sustainability Summit was held at the University of Washington-Tacoma, where transportation is one of the biggest sustainable issues. UWT pledged to seek ways to promote public transportation among students, including researching options for student bus passes.

Puget Sound colleges come together to set sustainable goals

By Meghan Erkkinen

Representatives of five Puget Sound higher education institutions met Feb. 10 to set goals to make their campuses more environmentally friendly.

More than 170 people registered for the first-ever South Sound Sustainability conference at the University of Washington-Tacoma, and organizers hope the conference becomes an annual event.

The representatives all agreed to make small, but significant, steps toward starting the discussion of sustainability on their campuses. The main focus of many institutions will be to make a committee or campus position to promote sustainable practices, and to promote public transportation for commuting students.

“We hope to do this again in a year to see how everyone did on their projects,” said Jim Gawel, a UWT associate professor and organizer of the event. “They (the goals) were all appropriate, no pie-in-the-sky stuff. They were all thought out as to what could be done. This is the minimum of what we want to accomplish and I think a lot of these people will do projects outside of that minimum.”

Several colleges presented their goals for specific projects they have been working on.

Tacoma Community College, for example, has a plan to implement an “adopt-a-can” program, where teams can buy recycling bins and sort through them to get rid of items that should not be recycled.

The University of Puget Sound is making a themed residential “green house,” which will be 100 percent sustainable. After a year, it will take feedback from residents as to how the project has gone. UPS also said it would increase its investment in alternate transportation, by beginning to convert its fleet to electric vehicles and by implementing a bicycle borrowing program.

Pacific Lutheran University promised to start an awareness campaign to educate students and faculty about sustainable practices. Pierce College agreed to push for the inclusion of sustainability in its master plan, and UWT said it would consider options for student bus passes or shuttles.

All of the institutions also agreed to use a new rating system, called STARS (Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System), to track how well they are doing. Several representatives also expressed interest in forming a consortium to address some issues, particularly public transportation.

Will Toor, a guest speaker on transportation issues, said what Pierce County colleges were experiencing was similar to what other institutions struggle with – a poor pedestrian environment, lack of local and affordable housing, lack of convenient public transportation, and the availability of free parking.

“There’s a lot of potential here,” Toor said. “At the UWT, I think it’s such an opportunity as the campus grows, I think it’s early enough to adopt some progressive transportation policies.”

He noted that about 20 to 40 percent of campus emissions around the country can be attributed to transportation to and from campus, and those issues need to be addressed to achieve a sustainable campus.

“You can’t get there without dealing with transportation,” Toor said.

The conference was accompanied the day before by a sustainability expo. Members of the public were welcome to attend the event, which featured speakers and booths for vendors and organizations. Between 500 and 600 people attended that event.

Next year, the campuses plan to regroup to discuss their progress and set new goals. Gawel hopes the conference will become an annual event, and that it will rotate between the Pierce County campuses.

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