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Hamilton Alumni Review
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 Campus OperationsMore Aware and More Efficient, College Shrinks its Carbon FootprintBy Sarah Bertino '09 and Alyssa White '11ARRIVING ON CAMPUS FOR HER FIRST CLASS OF THE DAY, A professor pumps up the thermostat in the seminar room to tame the morning chill. An hour later, the next professor to use the room walks in, fingers his collar in the heat and throws open a couple of windows. Outside, several students text and chat on cell phones, some of them to classmates within talking distance. After class, a few drop their soda cans and water bottles in the standard trash bin near the door. One student lingers in the room to copy some notes from the board, then races out to catch up with friends, leaving door and windows open and lights blazing. Another student walks to the parking lot and starts her car to get warm as she makes a few calls. Some in the class head to the dining hall, where they load up trays with burgers and other items they might want to sample. A few laptops come out as they settle in at a table. "Hey, I need to charge this thing," somebody says. "Anyone see an outlet?" It's easy to think of campus operations as merely the "hardware" side of sustainability — buildings and boilers, classrooms and labs, electricity and exhaust — but as this scenario suggests, the ways energy is used and abused on campus have as much to do with habits and attitudes as with resources.  Steve Bellona
"We not only have to build these facilities to be efficient, we then have to manage them to be efficient." Hamilton has made remarkable strides on both sides of that equation in recent years. A growing awareness that environmental threats such as global warming and dwindling biodiversity are real and critical has pushed the institution toward sustained action. Green technology, improved construction and retrofitting methods, and a growing emphasis on long-term planning have enabled the College to measure, assess and begin to reduce its appetite for the fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases. The goal is quickly to shrink, and ultimately to eliminate, Hamilton's "carbon footprint" — its total impact on the environment through the production of carbon dioxide and related emissions. One key to that quest turns up in conversation after conversation: unity of purpose, a shared sense of mission. "It's not something 'they' do," says Brian Hansen, director of environmental protection, safety and sustainability. "It's something we all do."  |
 Committed to a Green Tomorrow |
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