At the Nov. 20 Eastern Washington University board of trustees meeting, Mary Voves, EWU’s vice president for business and finance, and Michael Westfall, vice president of university advancement, presented a final draft of the university’s sustainability plan and the vision for a sustainability center on campus.
Voves said the inspiration for part of the plan’s objective is to create new practices and policies while maintaining current ones to support and promote environmental sustainability and stewardship at EWU and the community.
“Our students are way ahead of us in their thinking and embrace their thinking in stewardship,” Voves said.
Staff created focus groups that looked at sustainability practices from other colleges as well as its own, which include energy management, leadership in energy and environmental design certified construction on new buildings, recycling programs, zero-waste programs, climate-friendly purchasing and alternative transportation.
“Our weakest link is probably our public transportation,” Voves said. “We still have a lot of commuter traffic to the campus and our carbon footprint is mostly driven by commuter traffic in spite of our bus services.”
Voves said feedback from campus staff has helped identify focuses, mainly in infrastructure and facility. Staff is also putting a focus on sustainability in their curriculums.
She added that students in residence halls focused on recycling, reducing waste and water. The custodial team has also been using electrolyzed water as an alternative to chemicals when cleaning buildings.
Upcoming projects that will contribute to sustainability efforts include an electric vehicle charging site, which will be installed in January 2016. The Pence Union Building will receive a green roof as a part of its remodel and the EWU Interdisciplinary Science Center (ISC), will be LEED certified.
“Our goal is to be a zero-waste campus and we’re moving toward that goal faster than we thought,” Voves said.
Part of the sustainability plan included a draft of the Nature Environmental Science Testing and Teaching Center (NESTT), which will be located near the Red Barn. Westfall described the NESTT as a “living building” where it will receive all of its energy from the sun and water from the rain. The building will have an outdoor classroom and lab space where students can grow fresh food, test systems and celebrate nature. Surrounding the lab will be various plant life and trees that are native to the area.
Westfall said the university hopes to make NESTT the first living building on a public university campus in the United States. There are currently seven certified living buildings in the country – “A living building is one that produces 110 percent of the energy it needs to operate,” Westfall said. “We’d produce more energy than we need and put it back on the grid.”
There are seven imperatives for living buildings including place, energy, beauty, health, water, materials, health and happiness. Westfall explained that living building certification is granted after a building has been constructed.
Westfall said students will use systems to collect water and reuse gray water. There will also be technology to monitor the building’s performance.
“The goal is not to have this be a trophy but how do we incarnate this with the sustainability plan,” Westfall said.
The projected cost to complete the NESTT will be between $20 million — $25 million, which will all come from fundraising. Itron Inc., a technology and services company based out of Liberty Lake and collaborating with Eastern on the project, has already donated $200,000.
“We really see this as a community investment,” Westfall said. “It has ramifications for staff and our community. We want this to be interdisciplinary, not just within one college, and K-12 programs outreach. We get a ton of kids who participate in those outreach and this will bring them by the busloads.”
For more information on EWU’s sustainability efforts on campus visit
http://www.ewu.edu/about/administration/business-finance/sustainability
Al Stover can be reached at al@cheneyfreepress.com.
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