Cal Poly’s improvement in sustainability efforts have improved in the last year, according to GreenReportCard.org, but it is not necessarily reflective of maximum efforts, say environmental club leaders.
An annual report card is given to hundreds of campuses nationwide that evaluate and grade sustainability activities and progress for each campus. Cal Poly received a B+ this year, up from a B- in 2009. From the construction and deconstruction of buildings to make them more environmentally friendly, to an increasing number of electric university vehicles and the diversion of 70 percent of campus waste, Cal Poly is making strides in progressive sustainability actions.
Cal Poly received higher marks than last year in five of the nine categories graded, and was the only California State University campus designated as a Campus Sustainability Leader.
“I think within the CSU system, Cal Poly is definitely seen as the leader,” said Dennis Elliot, Sustainability Manager of Facilities Services. “We have routinely garnered the majority of Sustainability Best Practice Awards from the annual UC, CSU and community college statewide sustainability conference that has been going on since about 2004. In fact, last year in 2009, Cal Poly won four of the total six awards. Being recognized by the college sustainability report is a big deal for us.”
The grade shows Cal Poly has been progressing, but student environmental club leaders still feel real changes in sustainability can only happen with more commitment from the students.
The president of the Cal Poly Biodiesel Club, Mark Johnsonbaugh, feels Cal Poly is moving in the right direction, but without optimum student involvement, progress is limited.
“I think there’s a lot of really good things going on around campus,” Johnsonbaugh said. “There’s a lot of people who are interested in these ideas, and they want to participate in sustainability, but they just don’t know how to do it, or what to do.”
Tyler Hartrich, city and regional planning senior and vice president of the Empower Poly Coalition notices the gap between administrative efforts and student efforts.
“It’s definitely true that there’s a disconnect between students and what the administration is doing and what they’re pushing,” Hartrich said. “They have all these things going on, and the students have no idea. There is full disclosure about it, but it’s not like it’s on their website. How do students become involved? How do you bridge that?”
Both Hartrich and Johnsonbaugh feel the strain of the lack of student involvement in trying to accomplish their club goals.
The Empower Poly Coalition is a conglomerate of 27 environmental clubs, established spring 2007 to centralize the energy and goals of all the different groups interested in sustainability. Its membership has doubled since the last report card, which may account for the grade improvement from B to A in the student involvement category.
The coalition is currently working on several initiatives regarding sustainability policies. One is The Green Initiative Fund (TGIF), a policy which would add $5 to the College Based Fee that would go directly toward sustainability projects. If approved, the pool of approximately $300,000 would be delegated entirely by students for projects that would contribute to improving the sustainability of Cal Poly. But getting students to vote for a fee increase of any sort is particularly difficult, Hartrich explained.
“It’s totally doable,” he said. “And we’re not the only students doing it. In fact, we’re behind the times. UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara all have TGIF. Just recently, UC Irvine and UC Davis passed it. The cool part is, though, we’d be the first state school to do it.”
If more students were in actively participating in accomplishing this and other initiatives, Hartrich added, efforts would be much more successful.
The Cal Poly Biodiesel Club is also having trouble in reaching their goals without more student involvement.
“The club built a biodisel reactor and they lobbied Campus Dining to switch all of their diesel fuel vehicles to run on biodiesel,” Elliot said. “A mechanical system would take campus’s waste cooking oil and convert it directly into biodiesel, on campus, to be used as fuel in our fleet vechiles both for deliviry trucks and tractors in the (agriculture) area.”
Johnsonbaugh has been working tirelessly to construct and get his new biodiesel reactor, also his senior project, approved by administration. The club’s ultimate goal — to eventually have all diesel vehicles run on campus-produced biodiesel — can be accomplished easier if students would take advantage of the senior project opportunities that come with his club’s initiative, Johnsonbaugh said.
“The best way to get to the next step is more student involvement,” he said. “The best way to get students involved is senior projects.”
Hartrich and Johnsonbaugh don’t deny the obvious interest in sustainability from the students; there are clearly enough clubs to join and enough goals to reach to advance Cal Poly’s presence as a campus leader in sustainability. But both are certain that knowledge, awareness and serious commitment are the keys to any sort of progression.
“I really think it’s just the follow-through,” Hartrich said. “It’s not that hard to type in ‘Cal Poly sustainability’ and find us. But a little bit of it is just a lack of commitment and will power to go out and to find these organizations. When I step back and think about how many students could be potentially interested in our organization, it’s probably over half the school. But how do you get them in? In a perfect world, the best way to have students be a part of this is to have a center for sustainability.”
After a failed attempt fall quarter to revive the old campus powerhouse and convert it into a central hub for everything regarding campus sustainability, Hartrich is still hopeful that physically containing all sustainability efforts in one building will advance latent interest into active involvement and change.