Getting to Green Midd keeps it local in the search for affordable carbon neutrality

Author: Derek Schlickeisen and Mary Lane

The Target: Carbon Neutrality

It's a race to zero: by 2016, Middlebury hopes to have eliminated its annual carbon "footprint" of over 30,000 metric tons of CO2.

The commitment comes as part of the College's May 2006 Strategic Plan, which names "strengthening our environmental leadership and reputation" as one of the school's primary goals in coming years. It is a reputation which has already earned accolades. In September, the environmental news site The Grist named Middlebury as one of the nation's top 15 "green" colleges.

Yet the new goal poses a financial challenge to the College. In the midst of a $500 million capital campaign aimed at funding priorities from increased student aid to adding up to 25 new faculty, the College does not yet have a large enough endowment to simply sink money into environmental initiatives. Instead, the hope is that many projects - like the biomass power plant now under construction - will pay for themselves over time through energy conservation.

One particularly ambitious aspect of the carbon neutrality goal is already helping to shape the direction of campus planning. According to Sustainability Coordinator Jack Byrne, the College does not plan to rely primarily on carbon offsets - payments that support carbon-lowering activities, like tree planting and solar or wind power installation - to reach its goal, as peers like the College of the Atlantic have done. This limitation means that the College must make changes to its own infrastructure and practices rather than simply paying for those steps to be taken elsewhere.

"Our goal says that offsets are the last resort for us," explained Byrne. "We're going to try to achieve it by changing the way we operate, from the fuels we burn to the vehicles we run."

The College to date has largely steered clear of buying the offsets because the market for them is unregulated. Some carbon-offset providers have been criticized for over-representing the carbon impact of their practices, including counting contributions to already-planned renewable energy facilities as "additional" carbon-offset measures. In short, the College believes that taking care of its own carbon neutrality will make its impact greater than colleges - like the College of the Atlantic - who simply buy offsets.

The path to carbon neutrality officially began with the adoption of the Carbon Neutrality Initiative (CNI) into College policy by the Board of Trustees last May. The final product of a working group comprised of students and administrators, the Initiative was a victory for the Sunday Night Group, the student climate change organization whose members decided the year before to push for carbon neutrality on campus.

"By adopting carbon neutrality, the College is not only living up to its environmental mission, but its academic mission as well," said Jamie Henn '07, one of the initiative's organizers, at the time. "Middlebury prides itself on equipping its students with the skills they need to become leaders, whether it be in business, art, politics or academics. In a world where global warming is increasingly defining all of these fields, environmental literacy is just as important as knowing a foreign language."

This week, The Campus profiles a few stops on that path to neutrality: the cutting-edge Hillcrest Environmental Center, the renewable biomass power plant, and the Organic Garden.

Money Matters: The Greening of Middlebury's finances

As the anticipated costs of green projects on campus added up, the Class of 2007 decided to step up with a $92,000 founding commitment to the "Green Fund." Together with a seed gift of $2 million from former Board Chairman Churchill Franklin '71, the seniors' gift represented the first addition to a fund the Board of Trustees hopes will ultimately total close to $50 million.

The fund will support not only carbon neutrality efforts, but also those to educate students and community members through the College's environmental studies programs and colloquia.

One of the College's most prominent environmental projects, Weybridge House, will also soon draw support from the Green Fund. Members of the house frequently cook their own meals with foods obtained at the organic co-op in town, and Weybridge has teamed with the College's Organic Garden to host open feasts increasing the visibility of organic food on campus.

"We try to produce food for the College in a sustainable way by completing the food cycle on campus," said Jay Leshinsky, the Garden's advisor and a member of the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op's Board of Directors. "The garden uses compost made by the College to improve the garden soil. Vegetables grown on that soil are sold to Dining Services, and then Dining Services sends waste to be composted by the College to complete the cycle."

In addition to the Green Fund, the College's endowment overall may rightly be described as "greening," with investments being directed away from environmentally or socially irresponsible corporations. The College maintains a list of "do not touch" companies, such as PetroChina, which invest in obsolete energy technologies and have dubious human rights records. In PetroChina's case, the company has been accused of financially fueling the Darfur conflict with its investments in the region's oil market.

On several occasions, this moral imperative has gotten in the way of profitable investments - in 2006, the Student Investment Committee, a student-run investment group tasked with managing a portion of the College's endowment, was forced to divest from companies with poor track record.

Hillcrest: Beyond "LEED"

You cannot step inside the Hillcrest Environmental Center without being reminded of its green features - and that is the point.

"Instead of constructing a new building for its environmental programs, Middlebury College created a model of resource conservation and energy efficiency with the adaptive reuse of Hillcrest," reads a plaque made of recycled roof shingle by the front door.

The Center was renovated in 2007 using 80 percent of the old structure's building materials, and is registered with the U.S. Green Building Council's "Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design" (LEED) program, a national set of guidelines for environmentally sustainable building. LEED standards mandate certain levels of energy and water efficiency above and beyond state minimums. Features from lights that turn off in the absence of motion to extra insulation and double-paned windows help cut down both heating and cooling, while newer toilet designs flush with less than half the water used by their traditional counterparts.

Yet the LEED certification does not stand out today quite as much as it used to.

"LEED standards are almost becoming common now," said Byrne. "What we do goes above and beyond the LEED standard in terms of our focus on local labor and materials. Our preference is always to look first to local forests for our wood, and anyone doing sustainable forestry we go to first."

Buying local not only holds down transportation costs, but also pumps dollars into the Addison County economy - one of the poorest in Vermont.

"It keeps the dollars local, and when you spend dollars locally, they circulate about nine times before leaving Vermont," Byrne explains.

That spending adds up. The College spent more than $3 million renovating Hillcrest, a boon to the local contractors and material suppliers hired for the project. And as with the biomass plant, Middlebury hopes that the energy and water savings from Hillcrest's LEED-level features will save money in the long term.

"So far, the building has performed about 23 percent more efficiently than if it were simply built to the state codes and standards," said Byrne. "We're getting close to one year of occupancy, and once we re
ach that milestone, we'll be able to see the impact over a whole year."

If the 23 percent savings figure holds, the energy savings will amount to more than $20,000 annually - not quite enough to cover the cost of renovation, but a welcome statistic in light of rising energy prices.

Plunging into biofuel

By the end of the calendar year, the large construction pit behind Parton Health Center will have slowly morphed into a biomass power plant capable of burning over 20,000 tons of wood chips annually. After an $11.9 million investment in the facility, the College is hoping its ability to replace expensive fuel oil with locally grown alternatives will save an even greater expense as gas prices rise.

Of the College's entire carbon footprint, 70 percent is produced by the burning of number six fuel oil, an especially heavy grade of fuel used by the school's heating and cooling facilities. The two million gallons of this fuel consumed each year will be cut in half by the new plant.

While the carbon savings may be immediate, the financial payback will come over time.

"The cost of number six fuel oil has increased by about 33 percent in the last year," said Campus Sustainability Coordinator Jack Byrne. "The price of a ton of wood has not increased at all. Particularly with the new price of fuel oil, it would have been nice to already have biomass on line right now."

With the price of oil expected to rise even further during the foreseeable future, Byrne said that his office has reduced the biomass plant's estimated "payback period" ­- the number of years it will take for the savings from burning wood chips to cover the cost of building the plant - from 11 to nine years.

Yet such a heavy investment in renewable energy comes with logistical drawbacks - a relatively new industry, biofuels are not often used on the scale that they will be at the College.

"There is a well established physical infrastructure, from refineries and trucking to heating systems, to support the fossil fuel industry," said Tom McGinn, project manager for the biomass site. "The infrastructure to support biomass energy is much less developed, particularly for applications like our project that go beyond simply residential use."

Rather than tapping into the national oil market, the College will look to local producers to fill its need for 20,000 tons of woodchips annually. With an emphasis on keeping down transportation costs, plant managers will ideally look no further than 75 miles from Middlebury for their biofuels.

"I think that our local alternatives will develop over time as a part of the economic evolution of biomass energy," said McGinn.