The University of Florida in recent years has been known for its outstanding athletic programs, specifically football. The Gators have been atop college football rankings for the past four years. Now, their athletic programs are granting them top environmental rankings as well.

The Florida campus is home to the first and only Platinum LEED-certified athletic facility in the nation and recently added two energy-efficient LED video boards atop the north and south end zones at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.

In 2007, University of Florida President Bernie Machen joined the American College and University President’s Climate Commitment and established a goal for the university to be completely carbon neutral by 2025.

What better place to start than with their headline-making football program. That same year, UF hosted the first ever carbon neutral collegiate football game against Florida State. By 2008, the Gators had increased their efforts to by distributing more than 63,000 energy efficient CFLs and planting more than 200 trees creating a savings of more than $3.2 million for the Gainesville community. This year, Florida is taking it even further with its commitment to become the first carbon neutral athletic program. The Gators’ 2,500 ton carbon footprint will be offset through many local energy efficiency projects.

“We are excited to strengthen our commitment to The Gator Nation by partnering with the Neutral Gator Initiative to make our athletics program carbon neutral,” Athletic Director Jeremy Foley said in a statement. “The university is a leader in academics and athletics, and now we are proud to lead the way again by being the first carbon neutral athletics program in the nation.”

“The Neutral Gator Initiative will create enough local offsets this year to neutralize every sport’s team travel and all the athletic facilities. All of our offsets are created in the local community, with specific emphasis placed on the low-income sectors,” said Jacob Cravey, with the Neutral Gator Initiative.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

A year after showing up and discovering all the trays had vanished fron their dining halls, many college students returning to campus this fall will find more “green” changes. ARAMARK Higher Education is introducing a re-usable “to go” food container for use at the campus dining halls.

ARAMARK, which operate food services at more than 600 colleges and universities across North America, said it will roll out its new Green Thread program at many of the campuses it serves. The company projects the program will divert more than two million disposables from landfills during the 2009-2010 school year.

“Through our Green Thread environmental stewardship platform, ARAMARK continues to look for ways to reduce our environmental impact,” Michael Leone, Senior Vice President of ARAMARK Higher Education, said in a statement. “The re-usable ‘to go’ container program is the next phase of our ongoing plan to strive toward zero waste and support the sustainability goals of our partner campuses.”

ARAMARK said it successfully piloted the re-usable containers at several campuses last year, including Baylor University, University of Florida, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Peace College (NC) and Salem College (NC). Since implementing the re-usable “to go” containers in fall 2008, Baylor University reduced disposable container usage by 40 percent.

Last year, ARAMARK implemented a trayless dining program at the majority of its campus partner locations, which yielded “significant reductions” in energy, water, cleaning agents, food waste and waste removal, the company said. The new re-usable containers are dishwasher-safe and go through the same cleaning process as the dinnerware used in campus dining halls.

“Student feedback from the pilot program was very positive,” Leone said. “Everyone on campus immediately understood the reduction in landfill waste, when compared with a traditional, disposable container. Our program also commits to recycling these re-usable products at the end of their useful life.”

Green Thread was introduced in 2008 by ARAMARK to encompass a range of environmental stewardship programs and practices that can be offered to its clients.

We’re already used to worrying about at least one set of issues when it comes to melting caused by global warming: that water entering oceans from disintegrating arctic ice may cause sea levels to rise worldwide.

Now scientists suggest that another sort of melting could not only be caused by climate change, but could in itself accelerate it. At issue is not polar icecaps but permafrost, the frozen ground found in the far north.

There, organic matter is normally held in a state of very slow decay, with carbon kept out of the atmosphere for much longer periods than it would be otherwise. But as this ground thaws, as this University of Florida article puts it, “bacteria and fungi break down carbon contained in this organic matter much more quickly, releasing it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or methane, both greenhouse gases.”

The article summarizes a paper in the journal BioScience in which scientists led by Florida ecologist Ted Schurr show that factoring in carbon held deep within permafrost “more than doubles previous high-latitude [carbon] inventory estimates.”

While all of this carbon doesn’t simply enter the atmosphere at once when the ground melts, Schurr has estimated that the tonnage of carbon dioxide being released each year could eventually grow to around an eighth of the amount currently produced by burning fossil fuels. (Of course, thawing ground means more space for trees to grow, pulling CO2 from the air, but Schurr notes that a new forest on previously frozen ground couldn’t hold anywhere near the amount of carbon currently being stored by the permafrost.)

Another report this week amplifies the Florida team’s concerns, focusing on vast reserves of methane that may now be escaping after being held under ice and permafrost since the last Ice Age.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media