Oberlin College’s Integrated Green Thinking

Yesterday the New York times had a great article about students at Oberlin College. Anyone who is a Bill McDonough or Cradle to Cradle fan will know that McDonough and Partners used C2C principles to design the campus’ “Adam Joseph Lewish Center for Environmental Studies“, a beautiful building, designed after a tree, and using open-innovation strategies between faculty and students.

What exactly makes Oberlin so green?

Energy
Photovoltaic (PV) panels on the roof of the Center use renewable energy from the sun to meet a substantial fraction of the building’s energy needs. Solar energy production is coupled with energy efficient lighting, heating, and appliances to minimize negative environmental impact.

Heating, Cooling & Air Quality
Relying on both active and passive systems, the Center provides a comfortable working environment for students, faculty and staff. Active systems use mechanical equipment to extract and move heat, while passive systems do so with a minimum of mechanical devices.

Landscape
The Center was conceived as an integrated building-landscape system. The landscape features a variety of constructed ecosystems that simulate native Northern Ohio ecosystems and incorporate cultigens that produce food for humans.

Living Machine & Water Use
The Living Machine is an ecologically engineered system that combines elements of conventional wastewater technology with the purification processes of wetland ecosystems to treat and recycle the building’s wastewater for reuse in the toilets and landscape.

Weather Conditions
A weather station rises above the peak of the Center’s curved roof, monitoring real-time conditions and trends for a variety of environmental variables.

Materials
Materials for the Center were selected to enhance its sustainability and were evaluated based on criteria that required less energy inputs, encouraged local production and distribution, and supported creative economic structures.

Source: Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies

BUT…

It’s also a mindset, and that’s where the article in the Times comes in. Students, faculty and the community there are thinking, thriving and even competing to be green.

Check out the highlights:

• Mr. Brown, a 21-year-old economics major, recalled the marathon runner who lived in the house last semester, saying: “He came out of the shower one morning and yelled out: ‘Two minutes 18 seconds. Beat that, Lucas!’
• Oberlin’s new sustainability house — SEED, for Student Experiment in Ecological Design
• Students want to combat global warming by figuring out ways to reduce carbon emissions in their own lives
• With their professors as collaborators, and with their own technological and political savvy, students are persuading administrators to switch to fossil-free fuel on campus — Middlebury is building an $11 million wood-chip-powered plant, part of its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2016 — serve locally grown food in dining halls and make hybrid cars available for shared transportation when, say, the distance is too far to bike and there is no bus. Students are planting organic gardens and competing in dorm energy-use Olympics. At Oberlin last year, some students in the winning dorm did not shower for two weeks, officials said.

• “This is a generation that is watching the world come undone,” said David Orr, a professor of environmental studies at Oberlin

• All year they studied together in the living room at night so they would not have to turn on lights in the other rooms. They mastered worm composting, lowered the thermostat — keeping it at 60 degrees for most of the winter and piling on blankets — and unplugged appliances. There is no television, but no one seems to consider that a hardship.
• the students demonstrated how they caught their shower and sink water in buckets and reused it to flush their low-flow toilet, a budget model improvised with a couple of salvaged bricks in the tank.

Source: NY Times