From the Environmental Protection Agency

The 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards were presented in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference, held October 26-29 in Denver, Colorado.

Green Power Pilot Award

The 46 environmental and social justice organizations, over 700 local groups, and tens of thousands of young people that make up the Energy Action Coalition are leading the way in addressing climate change by creating vast networks of power, winning clean energy victories on campuses and in communities, and building a cleaner, healthier, and just future. In May 2005, Energy Action Coalition launched the Campus Climate Challenge to unite students and young people in achieving 100% clean energy policies on 1,000 campuses over three years. To date, they have reached over 2 million young people through the challenge and over 760 campuses have joined the campaign.

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From the Environmental Protection Agency

The 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards were presented in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference, held October 26-29 in Denver, Colorado.

Partner of the Year

The University of Pennsylvania buys nearly 193 million kilowatt-hours of wind-generated renewable energy certificates (RECs), an amount equivalent to 46 percent of its total purchased electricity use. The purchase is large enough to have placed Penn on both EPA’s National Top 50 and Top 20 Colleges and Universities purchaser lists.

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From the Environmental Protection Agency

The 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards were presented in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference, held October 26-29 in Denver, Colorado.

Green Power Purchasing Award

Oregon State University’s (OSU) purchase of nearly 67 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy certificates (RECs) is equal to nearly 75 percent of the total campus electricity consumption. The University’s purchase places the school on EPA’s list of Top 20 College and University green power purchasers. The school funded its purchase through a student “Green Fee” approved during a general campus election, and resulted in a purchase of RECs from a mix of biogas, biomass and wind resources. The Green Fee produced the highest voter turnout in OSU history, with more than 70 percent of voting students supporting the initiative.

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By Julie Bonnin

The U.S. energy policy may be in flux and economic uncertainty at an all time high but a “cap and trade” policy on greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. is likely to be a major initiative not long after the upcoming presidential election.

While emissions offset trading is active in Europe and Asia, and some voluntary trading has begun in the U.S., American energy corporations are anticipating tougher emission reduction regulations and a corresponding need for traders, lawyers and other business people to work within the system as it evolves.

Thus far no one’s come out with “Carbon Trading for Dummies.” But the University of Houston, through a joint program of the C. T. Bauer College of Business and UH Law Center, will offer what is thought to be the country’s first comprehensive carbon trading course in spring of 2009.

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By Harriet Blake

A new Bible published this week will speak volumes to anyone who cares about all creatures great and small.
The Green Bible, published by HarperOne (a division of Harper Collins), highlights in green all passages that relate to the environment and humankind’s duty to protect it. In keeping with its green message, the new Bible is printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink and is bound in earth-friendly linen.

“You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it.” Psalm 65:9

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By Catherine Colbert

When David Kilbourne picked up his 8-year-old son from Lake Travis Elementary in spring 2007, he noticed smoke billowing from idling buses parked in queue behind the school. The exhaust fumes his son was breathing each day as he waited to be picked up, he says, were contributing to his son’s migraine headaches. “My son is the quarterback for his youth football team,” said Kilbourne. “Because there’s only one quarterback, when he gets these headaches, it affects the team.”

Kilbourne remembers noticing the bus exhaust during the school’s bus safety week. “They were talking about how buses are safe when it comes to traffic accidents,” he said, “but there’s more to a bus’s safety than traffic accidents, like having air that’s safe to breathe.”

The coincidence spurred Kilbourne to take action. Not only did he write several letters to his local newspaper, but Kilbourne approached the head of his district’s transportation department to discuss air quality in and around its buses. After he spoke to Rick Walterscheid, the transportation director at the Lake Travis Independent School District, the school system put a no-idling policy into effect.

Walterscheid didn’t stop there, either. Later that year the 79th Texas Legislature adopted House Bill 3469, which established and authorized the formation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to administer a statewide clean school bus program.

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By Kelly Rondeau

It’s back to the books for kids across America and going green in the classroom has never been so easy. With the help of a popular program called the Go Green Initiative, teachers have quick and simple access online to all the tools and resources needed to green a classroom, an entire school, or even a school-district.

Serving as the charter and flagship school for the Go Green Initiative, Walnut Grove Elementary School, in Pleasanton, Calif., first found out about the program in 2002 when Jill Buck, a mother of three, and PTA president, got creative and began asking “What else could we do to go green?”

“The school was doing some gardening, composting and recycling, but I wanted to do more, so I sat down at my kitchen table and started writing up the initiative,” said Ms. Buck (pictured left). “That was in 2002, and since then the program has just grown and grown: we’re now operating in all 50 states in the US, we’re in 13 countries, and on 4 continents; our website gets over 2 million hits a month; it’s an amazing program. Schools are finding us on the Internet and simply by word of mouth.”

Walnut Grove’s principal, Bill Radulovich, comments, “It all started here on my campus, as Jill (Buck) was my PTA president. As the charter school for this program, she first starting designing ideas to partner with waste management to help us with recycling waste, and that grew into networking and working with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funds that are distributed to different programs.

“Where once we had cardboard boxes to hold are recycling items, we now have huge 55-gallon gobblers, these huge barrels with slots that are really cool. She helped us gain more methods in the form of recycling and reusing and how to be more efficient overall.”

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By Barbara Kessler

College-bound high schoolers looking for an environmentally conscientious college should have no shortage of guidance this year. The Sierra Club has joined the Princeton Review in assessing the green creds of U.S. universities.

Actually, the venerable environmental group was first out with the idea, launching a “Cool Schools” rundown in 2007. Their second annual review, in the group’s Sept./Oct.Sierra magazine, settles on list of the top ten campuses — Ten That Get It — that includes colleges of all sizes from the East to the West.

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By Harriet Blake

Other than the intoxicating smell of new text books and notebooks, the familiar scents of back-to-school may be changing. Ammonia-scented hallways, newly sealed and fuming gym floors, odorously painted classrooms as well as lawns with the subtle scents of pesticide treatments, may be a thing of the past.

In today’s more environmentally conscious world, public and private schools are rethinking how they maintain their buildings. Reducing toxic chemicals in schools – as in our homes — is not only good for the environment, but for those who use these buildings.

In Maryland’s Montgomery County outside of Washington D.C., the public schools have long taken a pro-active approach in using non-toxic cleaners.

“We want our buildings to be clean and at the same time healthy for our students, faculty and the person doing the cleaning,” says Larry Hurd, building services trainer for the school district.

Ten years ago, the district, which oversees 200 schools, changed from an oil-based sealer for their wood gym floors to a water-based sealer. It works well, says Mr. Hurd, and toxins are no longer an issue. “The oil-based sealer was bad for the students and other visitors to our schools, but it was real, real bad for the person applying the sealer.” That person was exposed to the sealer fumes for as much as four hours.

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By Julie Bonnin

Houston’s air quality and recycling rates may be nothing to brag about, but the city’s school district is among the country’s leaders in its commitment to building energy-efficient schools.

Walnut Bend Elementary, on the city’s southwest side, is one of the first of dozens of Houston Independent School District schools that will be built or retrofitted to meet LEED standards, the nationally accepted benchmark for design, operation and construction of high performance “green” buildings.

“We’re the largest employer in Houston, and we feel we have a responsibility to the environment,” says HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra. “We are teaching children, and that means we need to set an example of environmental stewardship that the children can follow.”

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By Shermakaye Bass

Summer’s ending and school’s recommencing — and along with the sound of bells ringing comes the simultaneous groan of kids nationwide. But this year, more American students than ever will return from vacation to a new backdrop, a green schoolhouse.

Yep, the little red school-house of yesteryear is getting a redo, making way for a 21st-century incarnation. Of this country’s 100,000 private and public schools, approximately one a day are now registering for LEED certification, according to the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

These little green schoolhouses still teach the “Three R’s” (reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic), but they’ve added three more – “Reduce, Recycle, Reuse.” And they’re doing it not just through energy-efficient building principles or water-conserving whiz-bangs, but through curricula, community-outreach projects, cafeterias, landscaping, new buses and transportation policies. One school in Oregon, Clackamas High School, has a city-wide cellphone battery recycling program and last year planted its own orchard.

The greening of America’s schools is a phenomenon to behold. Less than four years ago, Arizona and Washington state were two of the first to require all new public building construction meet LEED Silver requirements. Now dozens of states have green ground rules for schools. New York prohibits the use of non-green cleaners, while its neighbor New Jersey has mandated that all new schools be built to LEED specs. The 58 member schools of the Kentucky Green and Healthy Schools Program marked the project’s first anniversary this year (Kentucky made national news when it banned the sale of non-cafeteria foods on campus a couple of years ago).

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By John DeFore

Joining the existing array of programs addressing school bus pollution this fall (the EPA’s Clean School Bus USA, for example) is a new effort bringing the Texas Parent Teacher Association together with the state’s Commission on Environmental Quality.

The project, announced earlier this month, will supply funds to the PTA for bus pollution-control improvements. In a nice “let the punishment fit the crime” twist, those funds are coming from fines assessed to polluters, and will generally be used near the site of the pollution that provoked the fine.

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