One of Green Destiny's more ambitious goals is to reduce the ecological impact ("ecological footprint") of Penn State by half. We are focusing our efforts on campus buildings because buildings are the locus of consumption: it is here that members of the university community use and eventually dispose of computers, paper, equipment, furniture, carpeting, old chemicals, and on and on.
A Green Destiny Council team has just completed a comprehensive analysis of the Penn State Biology Building (Mueller). Our report entitled "The Mueller Report: Moving Beyond Sustainability Indicators to Sustainability Action at Penn State," explains how, step-by-step, Mueller can reduce its "ecological footprint" by more than half while creating healthier working conditions. The Report would be easy to extend to other buildings both at Penn State and on other campuses.
Green Destiny is now ready to engage in the delicate, time consuming, but essential, process of helping the faculty, staff, and students that occupy Penn State's buildings to: 1) see their buildings as ecosystems with huge inputs of materials and energy and enormous outputs of gases and material waste; and 2) come together as "building communities" to adopt measures that will reduce the ecological footprint of their buildings by more than half.
We hope to begin this "process" will with the creation of small "awakening" teams in a subset of Penn State's buildings. These teams will conduct building audits with the help of building residents. The audit will set the stage for an assessment of building impacts and concrete proposals (e.g., through small focus group discussions) for significantly reducing those impacts, along with specific policy recommendations. This process will give building residents the opportunity to work together (often for the first time ever) on a common problem and, ideally, create a sense of community and common purpose.
Over the next three-years Green Destiny will initiate and guide this process in one building in each of three Penn State Colleges (Education, Business, Engineering) and in one dormitory complex.
We are anxious to recruit student volunteers to help with this initiative. If you want to get involved, contact Joshua Pearce (jmp228@psu.edu) or Melissa Cardona (mxc399@psu.edu).