University noted in national environmental progress report

Sustainability is more than a fad.

That was the consensus among students, educators and national policy makers who participated in a teleconference yesterday to discuss the National Wildlife Federation’s Generation E report, a study of the best sustainability projects at universities across the country.

“We’re stuck with this,” said Ayodele Akinpelu, a Wayne State University student featured in the report. “Our parents and grandparents put this on us, and now we have to find a way out of this situation.”

This university was featured twice in the report, which investigates university sustainability programs focusing on 35 topics, ranging from renewable energy to behavior change and from waste reduction to transportation.

The university was recognized for the support that university President Dan Mote has given to sustainability initiatives with his signing of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, a pledge to eliminate university pollution that contributes to global warming through efficiency, clean energy initiatives and sustainable transportation.

Though Mote was one of about 650 university leaders to sign the pledge, he also hosted the “Smart and Sustainable Campus Conference” here in spring 2008, at which he explained that he signed the pledge to protect the futures of the students who are currently fighting for sustainability.

Additionally, the report’s section titled “The Quest for Non-Food Fuels” featured the Trash-ahol  program, which university professors Steve Hutcheson and Rob Weiner developed in 2008.

The program, which created a process to convert large amounts of trash into ethanol and other biofuel alternatives, which are then converted to gasoline, has the potential to produce up to 75 billion gallons of carbon-neutral ethanol a year.

Since Trash-ahol’s inception, Hutcheson and his team have gone on to work with a Minnesota company to further develop their program. The recession has slowed the project, but Hutcheson continues to apply the Trash-ahol process to different types of waste.

Hutcheson has undergraduate students helping him with his research both on the campus and in Minnesota. He said he finds early involvement in the sustainability movement to be crucial.

“I think it’s probably the most critical thing that they can get involved in, other than eating and sleeping,” he said. “We do many things that can be done more efficiently and more sustainably that will lessen our impact, and our impact is becoming significant so that it is affecting not only the livelihood of your children’s children but also of yourself.”

In the 2010 College Sustainability Report Card, an unrelated report released earlier this year, the university recieved a B. But in the student involvement category, the university received an A.

“We have one of the foremost activist-type campuses on sustainability issues,” said Laura Calabrese, organizational director of UMD for Clean Energy.

But despite the level of activism at this university, Calabrese emphasized the importance of continuing to get more students behind the cause.

“Students historically in this century have been at the forefront of every social movement,” she said. “We drive everything that’s going on, and we’re now entering the time of our lives where we’re going to be the ones making the choices... We have to be the sustainable generation.”

jborowski at umdbk dot com