Green College Spotlight: Williams College
March 2, 2009 · Print This Article
Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts is ramping up their efforts to be environmentally responsible, putting lots of new sustainability projects in place and challenging students, faculty and staff to reduce their energy consumption and help the entire campus go green. Williams College committed itself to sustainability in 2007, announcing a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
So far, they’re doing pretty well. The college’s emissions for 2007-2008 were 23% below 2006, thanks to efforts like switching to a hydro-generated electricity provider and conducting energy efficiency improvements in the central heating plant. Williams College has also installed a new solar hot water system on Fort Hoosac, a dormitory that houses 13 graduate students from the History of Art program. Solar panels are also in place at the Morley Science Center and the Library Offsite Shelving Facility.
Williams College has been lauded for their food and waste management efforts in particular, thanks to their emphasis on local, organic food and a comprehensive recycling program. The college spends about 12 percent of their annual food budget on products from local farms, including grass-fed beef and organic produce. They serve fair-trade coffee, use reusable dishware for outdoor picnics and offer only biodegradable to-go containers. The college composts food waste and keeps 20% of its waste stream from heading to the landfill.
LEED certification is being sought for all of Williams College’s current construction projects. When renovating and retrofitting buildings on campus, Williams College has incorporated green building practices.
Students are heavily involved in all sustainability efforts at Williams. Sustainability is built right into the student orientation, and and Zilkha Center hires Eco-Reps during the school year to work on green projects. Students also engage in dorm energy competitions.
On December 24th, 2008, Williams College began an experiment called ‘The Great Shutdown of ‘09’ to see how much money and energy they could save by turning off equipment and lowering the thermostat in campus buildings while students were away for the holidays. The results were quite impressive: they saved nearly $90,000 and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 287 metric tons, over 1% of their annual total.
All of these efforts earned Williams College a B+ on the 2009 College Sustainability Report Card. We’d like to see Williams College push that score up to an A for 2010 by focusing on their one weakness: transportation. Let’s get some more green transit programs in place, and you’ll really be getting somewhere! Thanks, Williams College, for all your hard work – it’s clearly paying off.
Link [Williams College]
- William Sherard's Fundraising Page
- FREE WILLIAM THE MESSENGER OF GOD
- Assist high school soccer players receive recognition from college coaches, by Brandon Williams
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Lowering the Williams score because the school purportedly doesn’t have sustainable transportation makes no sense. It is a small residential college. Everyone walks to classes. In colder weather, they sometimes cross-country ski to class. Lots of students have bikes that they use in the fall, spring, and summer, and there is a free student bike repair club and facility and free use of the skis and snow shoes from the Outing Club. The school runs a bus to nearby towns for shopping and errands on the weekends. Grease from the dining halls helps fuel dining hall suppliers’ vehicles. Students don’t tend to go away for the weekend. Teams use vans and buses to get to games and the crew’s and cross-country runners’ off-campus areas. Students get to and leave the campus at the beginning and end of term by riding in high-occupancy chartered buses to the cities and the airport. Many of the faculty members live within walking distance of the campus. The college helps set up carpooling for faculty and staff members who live beyond walking distance. The college has purchased offsets for the transportation used in major events like graduation. Williams students, faculty, and staff probably have one of the lowest per person daily conventional car mileage of any campus in the country (except for places like Columbia and NYU that have the subway system and are in a low-car city).
Williams has ran a student-led initiative called “Do It In The Dark”, where dorms on campus compete to use the least amount of electricity, which greatly predates the shut down project you mentioned.
Also, transportation should be lauded at Williams, as Larry points out. Nearly every student walks, bikes, skates to class. People don’t drive to parties on the weekend because the all the dorms are basically on campus. This has been the Williams way since the late 1700s when the school first began- Do we get no credit for living the sustainable lifestyle before it was in vogue? That’s AT LEAST an A-, at worst.