Want to promote sustainability and help the college address its budget challenges?
Here’s your chance.
When the Evergreen community put together a range of steps last year to address our budget challenges, we made a commitment to reduce our spending on utilities – electricity, natural gas, water, sewer and solid waste – by 10%. That’s $280,000 per year.
This is a challenge because, given the long term upward trend in energy prices, we may actually have to cut our utility use by more than 10% to get the savings we need. Also, our past successes in reducing energy use – through renovations and efficiency projects – make the job ahead even more difficult. We have already achieved many of the “easy” savings.
We need your help!
While Facilities Services will continue efforts to improve the efficiency of our physical plant and operations, that’s only part of the picture. We need to reduce consumption and we need your help to do it. We need you to make a few choices that – when multiplied by the more than 5000 members of our campus community – will add up to something big. We need to “be the change we want to see.”
What Can You Do?
· Keep the thermostat at 68 in winter (wear a sweatshirt or sweater) and 76 in summer.
· Turn off lights, computers and other equipment when they’re not in use.
· Use less (paper, power, water, packaging – bottles, cans, etc.).
· Reuse and recycle more.
Our Greener Living Guide has more sustainability tips for home and work (scroll down on the page).
Balancing Pain and Gain
Aggressive conservation programs often straddle the boundary between need and discomfort. Some of our conservation efforts may challenge you at times and there may be valid causes for complaints. We’re trying to strike a balance between energy savings and fulfilling our mission of teaching and learning. For instance, temperatures will be a little lower in winter and higher in summer. You will also see some “de-lamping” (removing some lights from multiple-light fixtures).
If you have complaints about enduring and excessive conditions that truly detract from our ability to fulfill our mission, please report them to the Work Request Center with enough specificity (room, time, and nature of complaint) to allow appropriate remedies.
Director Paul Smith and the Facilities Services staff welcome your suggestions to help them in their work. Please contact them at 867-6120 or facilities@evergreen.edu if you have ideas, questions or concerns. You can learn more about our energy use HERE.