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>>ANNOUNCER: More than eight hundred people with one mission - promoting a healthy environment.
We are the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.
>>GREG ADOLFSON: Taken together, West Virginia University and Marshall University are home
to more than 43-thousand students. Throw in faculty, staff and support personnel and you're
looking at a pretty significant population group -- a population approaching the size
of West Virginia's largest cities -- so when they act as a group, to promote the idea of
sustainability as part of their larger overall mission, the effects are significant, long
lasting and potentially wide reaching.... >>Clement Solomon: "When you look at sustainability,
it is a reframing of the environmental movement from the 70's. The environmental movement
focused only on the environmental aspects. What sustainability brings to the table, it
the economic and the social aspects." >>NARRATION: Clement Solomon is Director of
Sustainability at West Virginia University. WVU's office of sustainability opened in 2008
with the idea of looking at sustainability at an institutional level.
>>Clement Solomon: Recycling is our flagship program for sustainability. Recycling has
gone through over seven years of efforts across campus. Recycling has also branched off into
our football game day recycling... >>Margie Phillips: "We looked at recycling
first and we've let everything expand out from that point so it's difficult because
it's a change of habits and every employee on campus needs to be educated and we found
that education is the only way that we can get this message out.
>>NARRATION: Margie Phillips is Clement Solomon's counterpart at Marshall.
>>Margie: "The message is sustainability is a change of lifestyle. Our goal is to have
zero waste going out of the university so eventually I think we'll get there -- we're
still a little ways off -- probably about 30 percent now so that's very good in that
we've only been doing this since 2009 and so that is our initial goal so... Greener
purchasing is so important and here at the university we just want to try to get the
information out to other companies about what we do and try to encourage them to do it also."
>>NARRATION: Both schools are using a community based approach -- recognizing that the actions
they take affect the community around them. One example is Morgantown's personal rapid
transit system which entered service in 1975 and whisks riders between WVU's two campuses
and downtown along a nearly nine mile track system. The system was designed as a way to
alleviate traffic congestion between the two campuses and through the center of town. About
16-thousand riders a day use the system. Both schools have active storm water management
programs that utilize green infrastructure and both schools were recently recognized
by the US EPA for their food donation and waste diversion efforts. Marshall and WVU
are two of twenty-six Mid-Atlantic Region universities that have joined the EPA's Food
Recovery Challenge. >>Kathy Curtin: "We've worked a lot on waste
reduction so some of the things that we have done is any kind of leftover food that's still
usable that maybe we can't incorporate into our menus, we donate to the homeless shelters.
We've cut down waste a lot by basically eliminating trays from our all you care to eat dining
halls. We recycle all of our cardboard. We recycle our steel cans, a lot of our plastics.
We try to capture any of the cans or bottles that we might use at one of our catering events.
We recycle our fryer oil. About two years ago we did an intensive waste audit in all
of our dining halls and we did it for a week and we sorted the trash and weighed all of
the different types of trash from our kitchens and our dining halls so we could get a really
good picture about how much was compostable, how much was landfill and how much could be
recycled and that was something that the students saw and were part of because they had to divide
their mostly compost and landfill items out of the trash when they brought their trays
back." >>NARRATION: By making these small changed,
both universities are trying to raise their students' environmental awareness...
>>Traci Knabenshue: "We're really teaching students patterns that are going to follow
them and that they are going to repeat throughout their lives so to get them in the mode of
recycling and learning about sustainability and making that part of their daily habits
-- that's something that's really important to us as a university and something that's
going to be really important to these generations that are going through college right now throughout
the rest of their lives much more so than we even see today."
>>NARRATION: And that message is spreading to the larger community...
>>TRACI: "Here in Morgantown, even though we are a pretty large university we're still
a rural community and recycling in rural communities is still something that is developing and
changing and we're trying things. We're trying new methods of recycling -- still evolving
practices, procedures and what we do here on campus and I think that that translates
to the community. The city of Morgantown has a recycling program but a majority of our
citizens live outside city limits so figuring out how we can bring recycling and other sustainability
practices to those people is important." >>GREG ADOLFSON: And it's a similar story
at many of the state's smaller institutions -- projects like recycling programs, energy
management or waste reduction, the ideas of environmental stewardship, student engagement
and community involvement are taking root on campuses all across the state.
Coming up -- some things you can do to reduce your environmental impact this winter. We're
back in a moment.