Campus Sustainability

For this weeks blog in my environmental science class we had to think about campus sustainability on RCC campus. When assessing campus sustainability it is important to think about many different factors. Thinking about energy would be the first thing I would think to assess. How much electricity are we using per building or per classroom. Another would be how many students go to RCC and how many of those students drive their own car or carpool, or could we have a program to promote carpooling? We could think about water use. How water is used in our cafeteria and how much is used in the bathrooms? We could also think about waste. How much waste are we making and how are we disposing of that waste. Looking into making sure our campus has good plant life would be important as well. Another factor could be where we are getting our food sourced from, are our foods local or not? These are a bunch of factors that RCC could use to assess their sustainability. We also had to look at another campus' assessment and survey it. In Berkeley's assessment, they used energy and climate, water, built environment, waste, purchasing, land use impacts, and transportation to assess their sustainability. The last part of the assignment is to make your own assessment plan. I would want to look into the food at RCC. I would probably interview the kitchen staff, specifically the person in charge of ordering the food. Maybe pay attention to the brands and companies that RCC orders from on a regular basis. This wouldn't have to be a long process because generally a kitchen always orders from the same company. After gathering information about the foods being used and where they come from you would have to do some research on where those brands and companies source their food from. We would want to measure how much of the food used in the kitchen is locally grown and sustainable. I would probably get permission to do this from the head of the kitchen and convince them to let me assess it for business sake. Better quality food can produce more revenue but moreso a happier healthier student. If the student is healthier then they are more likely to succeed in school which is the ultimate goal of the school at whole.