Sustainability Progress at Unity College


The Unity Challenge: Frugal Sustainability
Unity College produces a little more than 4,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent climate agent per student per year. Our per capita emissions have declined by 28% since 2001, and our overall emissions by almost 20%, despite adding buildings, building additions, and students. This estimate includes student, faculty, and staff travel-to-school emissions, and the emissions produced by the college’s entire vehicle fleet.

Overall climate emission level is a good proxy measure of our overall ecological efficiency. For comparison, based on our recent survey of twenty other colleges’ and universities’ published sustainability reports, a four-year state-run college typically produces between 8,000 and 12,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per student, and a major state or private research university may produce as much as 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions per student per year.

Unity had the least actual emissions of any other college we could find. Our challenge? Beat us at our own game. If your college has better actual emissions, we want to know.


How Do We Do So Well? 
Well, we’ve been thinking about sustainability for a long time, and the things that we did five, ten, 20, 30, or even 40 years ago, other colleges are just thinking about doing now. Additionally, our programs are driven by students, who keep us efficient and honest by asking hard questions.

Students are important members of all college sustainability committees. Unlike a lot of our peers, we fixed the whole campus, not just one showcase building. And we didn’t buy ourselves out of the problem by purchasing carbon offsets. We actually did the right thing and fixed
our buildings.


Our Current Plan: We Put"Frugal" in "Frugal Sustainability"
Our current plan is to further reduce climate emissions by 5% per year (minimum) using careful calculations of cost-benefit and payback period. We are exploring the possibility of converting our heat plants to biofuels, most likely Maine-produced wood fuel products. Whatever emissions we cannot actually reduce right here on campus, we will have to offset, but we still have plenty of scope for actual emissions reductions on campus, and so that is where we’re putting our money right now. And the money is, after all, our student’s money. That’s the “frugal” part of “frugal sustainability”. If we can do it, you can too!


Unity's Progress in Other Areas of Sustainability
We have been growing our own organic vegetables for quite some time, using them in our food service, and recently added to our food programs by starting a livestock farm in concert with our student FFA Club.

We are undertaking a major campus master planning process this fall 2007, helped by PDT Architects of Portland Maine, in which wellness, the college’s rural tradition, and the relationship of indoor to outdoor space are important factors.


Forty-four Years of Sustainability at Unity College
Unity College Students led the college in making the following progress in physical campus sustainability and in sustainability education, 1965 to the present: Reverse timeline with links:

Summer 2007: Bensonwood Homes, a nationally recognized timber frame housing design and build company, unveils its design for the new President’s House. The design calls for a LEED certified, “zero net carbon” building meeting the famous “Passive Haus” standard. Using advanced solar photovoltaic technology, the building will produce more energy than it uses. The design will be made available to the public as part of the MIT “Open Prototype” initiative.

Summer 2007: Unity College president Mitch Thomashow presents at both the National Council for Science and the Environment’s Council of Environmental Deans and Directors and at the Environmental Studies Summit about Unity College’ s sustainability efforts.

May 2007: Unity College begins a full heat system retrofit of Wood Hall residence, replacing an outdated steam boiler with new plant. The new system is expected to use less than 60% of the heat fuel used by the old one, and by itself will meet the college’s climate emissions reduction goal of 5% for this year. Of course, we plan to do more.

Spring 2007: Unity College faculty vote to allow two new degree programs, a Bachelor of Science Degree in Sustainability Design and Technology, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Sustainable Food and Agriculture, to be listed in the catalog for the college to offer in Fall 2008. The programs must still be approved by the faculty, the President, and the Board of Trustees.

Spring 2007: Unity student and soon-to-be alumna Stephenie McGarvey is awarded the Maine Campus Compact “Heart and Soul” award for her amazing activism around sustainability and climate change issues in the State of Maine and beyond.

March 2007: Unity College is a proud co-organizer, with the Newforest Institute, of the Inside Out Green Building Conference held at the Waldo County Technical Center. Eighty local householders, contractors and trades-people attend for a full day of expert seminars in energy efficiency and green building and retrofit.

Fall 2006: A new college President, Mitch Thomashow, a national expert in sustainability, comes on board. Associate Professor Nancy Ross is asked to chair a committee to research and design new sustainability majors for Unity College, to come on-line in 2008.

Interim Provost Mick Womersley is asked to chair the sustainability policy committee. At the committee’s recommendation, each college employee, including faculty, is made responsible for contributing to sustainability through their formal job description. All major departments produce a sustainability plan, with quantitative departmental goals. Department heads are made responsible for meeting the goals in the sustainability plan.

Fall 2006: Swiss videographers Roman Keller and Christina Hameur visit Unity to interview faculty, staff and students about our famous “Jimmy Carter” solar panels. The completed video is shown in Zurich, Switzerland.

September 2006: Unity College’s sustainability ideas booth wins first prize at the Maine Organic Farmer’s and Gardener’s Association Common Ground Fair for the most educational booth at the fair. Newly hired Sustainability Coordinator (and recent alum) Jason Reynolds organizes the booth with a dedicated team of students. The college shows off wind turbine measuring equipment, a greasel truck, a historic “Jimmy Carter” solar panel, and many other fine displays.

Summer 2006: Concerned to keep climate emissions low, Unity College super-insulates the ceiling crawl space of three large older buildings, EastView, WestView and the Coops (actually a recycled chicken coop), together representing roughly 60% of the total space on the entire campus. The insulation level is boosted to R50/60 using cellulose, essentially recycled newspaper treated with a natural rock-based fire retardant. Cellulose is the recycled insulation product of choice.

May 2006: Ground is broken on two new green buildings. The new residence hall, eventually named “Maplewood” in a college wide naming competition, is powered entirely by renewable electricity (as is every other building on campus), is super-insulated, with R60 cellulose (a recycled product) in the ceiling and R26 BIB (blown-in-blanket) insulation in the walls.

The building features “Solartube” natural lighting systems and skylights for day-lighting, a super-insulated “Alaska slab” foundation with hyper efficient under floor heat, top of the line low-e Anderson windows, low VOV paints and glues and adhesives. Because of the overall building efficiency, this 6,000 square feet building is heated by a 175,000 BTU boiler – smaller than the one in many American houses.

A new health center is built to the same specifications. The buildings are slated to use less than a third the heat fuel per square foot of other buildings on campus.

May 2006: On old inefficient building, “Alderbrook,” is torn down. This ensures that the college can add useful space without adding to its climate emissions. We will eventually build five times the space and heat it with the same amount of energy that this old leaky building used.

January 2006: The Planning Committee of the Unity College Board of Trustees orders up a comprehensive building capacity and fuel efficiency study, dubbed "The Matrix." The Matrix makes clear that there is a proper order and progression to the process by which buildings are either retrofitted with energy efficiency concerns in mind, or replaced with energy efficient buildings.

Partly based on this data, the college adopts plans to build two new LEED Certifiable buildings this summer 2006, one a residence, the other a replacement for the health center (the former health center, an old farmhouse, is one of the least energy efficient buildings on campus).

Other buildings are slated for retrofitting with more insulation, boiler replacement, heat plant control improvements, and the like.

2005: Students on the Sustainability Committee regroup and make new plans for campus transportation, trails-to-school and bike-to-school schemes, for more local food, and for the re-use of the solar and wind power demonstrators.

2005: Interim President Mark Lapping orders a full-service energy audit. The audit will include the calculation of payback levels for most college energy efficiency projects envisaged for the next few years.

2005: Six Unity College students and Interim provost Mick Womersley attend the October 2005 NECSC meeting at Harvard University. For the second consecutive year, we are the college with the largest number of students to attend this meeting.

2005: Unity College student Casey Coe makes a stir at the 2005 MOFGA Fair with his two meter wind turbine, built from recycled auto parts as an internship with local businessman Peter Baldwin of Baldwin Apple Ladders, Inc.

2005: The college makes plans to build two new LEED buildings in summer 2006. A new residence hall and a new health center will be super-insulated and naturally lit.

Summer 2005: The college builds a new wing on its Cianchette Hall residence. The new wing is super-insulated, has low “e” windows and doors, good natural light in all bedrooms and heated floors. The other wings of this residence, with 25 students apiece, use only 1100 gallons of heat oil per year each. This new wing is expected to use even less.

2005: As per the food portion of the sustainability plan, the new Hoophouse produces spinach and salad greens for Food Service in the spring and fall of the student year. The Community Garden produces 500 pounds of potatoes. The garlic crop is disappointing, but a major planting effort in fall 2005 promises more garlic in fall 2006.

Fall 2005: The college kicks off the new academic year with the accession of Interim President Mark Lapping, an environmental planning and sustainability expert, and with a speech by environmental advocate Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Summer 2005: Constable Hall, recently refitted, uses 9% less electricity this summer because of reduced air conditioning demand.

2005: An energy-efficient straw bale house built for less than $25,000 and occupied by Associate Professor Mick Womersley and his partner Aimee Phillippi is the focus of a major national and international news story. The story, by Associated Press Reporter Glen Adams, circulates all over the US, and is even seen in the Shanghai Daily and the St Johns, Newfoundland Telegram.

Winter 2004/2005: Constable Hall, recently refitted, uses 20% less heat fuel this year than last, despite the colder winter.

Winter 2004/2005: The efficient new boilers in the Activities building use 7% less heating oil this year than the old dinosaur they replaced, even though the winter is much colder than in both 2002/2003 and 2001/2002, and as a result our overall heating energy use is up by 12%.

2004: The college refits Constable Hall. This building was the Constable family farmhouse when the college site was their poultry hatchery back in the 1960s. After forty years of college use, it’s looking a little shabby. A major donation from the Constable/Schaefer family is used to fix the building up properly, with better insulation, new windows, and new siding.

2004: Students visit the 2004 Northeast Campus Sustainability Summit 2004 at the University of New Hampshire.

2004: Students and faculty erect the new hoophouse to provide fresh organic vegetables in fall and spring.

2004: Faculty pass the Human Ecology and Sustainability Minor.

2004: The Spring 04 class in Advocacy, Ethics, and the Environment developed a plan to bring into the cafeteria more food from local farms and the college garden.

2004: A sustainability audit is conducted, concentrating on Unity College’s climate emissions. The results show that the college emits about 4,000 lbs of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per student per year, a reduction of over 1000 lbs since 2001. Research shows that other colleges, even those with well-funded campus sustainability programs, may emit up to 18,000 lbs per student per year.

2004: Students construct a demonstration 1KWH wind turbine and erect it adjacent to Baxter Cottage (a dorm). The solar power demonstrator is also recycled to make a combination solar/wind system for the cottage.

2004: A new twin boiler fitted by Maintenance in the Activities Building replaces an ancient system. Large energy savings are expected, further reducing our climate impacts.

2004: Unity College buys new dorm furniture from the most sustainable companies following recommendations based on student research.

2003: A student led project to organize direct food buying from local farmers is led first by student Heather Chapelle, then by Elizabeth Baldwin.

May 2003: Students in Nancy Ross's Advocacy, Ethics, and the Environment class develop a Comprehensive Recycling Action Plan for campus.

Sept 2003 to present: Student CRAP crew carries out locally-based recycling throughout campus and for commuting students.

Fall 2003- present: Constructive Activists: a student group does campus-wide education for sustainability and other issues through speakers, fireside chats, sidewalk "chalking," and other events.

2003: Unity College commits to buying 100% of its electrical power from Maine-based renewable resources.

2003: A new walk-in refrigerator is fitted to the main kitchen. The new walk-in uses 75% less electricity than the old one.

2003: Unity College sustainability students visit Harvard University and wow sustainability advocates, students and professors with their knowledge.

2003: Unity College student Jason Reynolds is given an award by the National Wildlife Federation for his climate advocacy.

2003: Unity College buys new dorm furniture from the most sustainable companies that sustainability students can find.

2003: Students construct a solar power demonstrator, and use it for the famous Solar Power Dance Party, and to light Christmas lights of the college teepee.

2002: Unity College commits to buying about 60% of electrical power from renewable sources.

2002: The new Landscape Horticulture degree program is instituted, and students take over much of the responsibility for the colleges landscaping using only organic techniques.

2001: Sustainability Committee makes its report. As a result, many of the actions above take place.

2001: Unity College switches to 100% recycled paper for all practical uses.

2001: The food service, slated to be taken over by a major multinational corporation, is instead improved, and a food service director who is willing to work with local and organic produce is hired.

2001: A comprehensive food scrap recycling program is instituted, started and run by students, led by student Jennifer Knight, a Unity College original. The program accepts and processes nearly 400 pounds of waste weekly.

2001: Unity students visit Washington DC to attend a national sustainability conference in preparation for the Johannesburg UN Earth Summit. The Unity contingent is the largest single undergraduate or graduate delegation at the conference.

2000: Unity College hires its first full time sustainability professor, Dr. Mick Womersley, to teach the human ecology curriculum.

2000: Incoming College President, noted ecologist David Glenn-Lewin, appoints the Sustainability Committee to report on how to make the campus as sustainable as possible.

1999: Faculty passes the Interdisciplinary Core Curriculum with Core 3 and 4, the primary human ecology/sustainability courses now mandatory for all students. Unity College is the first college in the country to require a course in sustainability for all graduates.

1997: Professor David Potter makes “future vision” speech to graduating class. Calls for enhanced campus sustainability program .

1970s: Unity College undertakes a comprehensive energy audit and enters a contract with a professional energy audit company to replace light bulbs and certain appliances for “no net cost.” Metering devices are fitted to lights switches and equipment to monitor electricity use. In the early 2000s, other colleges will do this work for the first time

1965: Unity College starts as it means to go on by recycling a campus. With the support of business leaders in the Town of Unity former Constable family farm and chicken hatchery is converted to a college campus. Buildings are recycled wholesale – chicken coops become offices and classrooms, farmhouses become administrative offices. In the early 2000’s, other colleges will compete for LEED points, doing what we’ve been doing since 1965.