Many universities are trying to bring sustainability to campus through measures such as serving organic food in dining halls, using carbon-neutral power sources and constructing buildings that qualify for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. Yet some institutions have expressed concern that some of these efforts do little to reduce environmental impact. Chemist David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., recently sat down with Science News writer Rachel Ehrenberg to discuss walking the green line.
Outside of curriculum changes, how has Pomona approached sustainability?
Just before I arrived, the college had developed a policy on building standards for sustainability, but we’ve pushed that forward in several directions. In particular, we now have a policy of LEED Gold for all new construction, and if anything, to go beyond LEED Gold. We’re really trying to develop our own standards, which are in some cases California-specific. The LEED standards are fine in general across the country, but one of the things we find is that water use is so important in California, but it may not be as important in some other part of the country. The LEED standards are really too generic, so we’re going beyond those standards.
There are always challenges, certainly with the balance between LEED standards, on the one hand — reducing energy costs and sustainability — and the aesthetics. We just have a new residence hall underway. And there were two groups, both on campus and on the board of trustees, and one group wanted to build a traditional building that in California would have red tile roofs, and another group wanted solar panels covering the roofs. We decided with the latter. We went in the sustainability direction partly because it was on the edge of the campus. If it had been at the core, we might have decided we wanted to have that character.