Setting the Tone: What Ohio University is doing to lead Southeast Ohio's sustainability movement.

As the largest employer in the county and an intellectual powerhouse in the region, Ohio University must lead by example if Southeast Ohio is to have any chance at becoming a culture that holds sustainability as a value worth fighting for. As with all universities, it is the obligation of OU to not only integrate progressive ideas into its operation but to research and promote new thoughts and strategies into the region that supports it and, ultimately, into society as a whole.

When it comes to issues of sustainability, it’s no surprise that much of what happens here interacts with the Office of Sustainability in some way. The brick office building they share with the Dining Services is located within a stone’s throw of the University’s power plant, a towering symbol of the institution’s environmental impact on the area. When Sonia Marcus looks out the window of the office she holds as Sustainability Coordinator it dominates her view, concealing the wooded rolling hills that are visible from any other spot looking south across the Hocking River.

“I feel like it’s extremely appropriate,” she says, “Sometimes when people ask me, ‘You know your office is right next to the coal plant? Isn’t that just totally lame?’ I’m like, ‘No it’s exactly right.’ I mean where else would we want to be, than right next to the coal plant? I mean it’s — that’s what we’re dealing with.”

Sonia is a Manhattan-born Stanford graduate who — after spending three years in Senegal doing everything from documentary filmmaking to teaching English and fighting AIDS — came to Ohio University for grad school. With such an impressive background, I can only say that she completely knocked me on my ass when she began telling me how much more connected she feels to OU than she ever did to Stanford.

“I don’t like rooting for people and causes that are already way ahead, and sort of in my mind I guess I thought of [Stanford] as already way, way, way overdone,” she says, “I feel like OU for me is a lot scrappier… We’re in coal country where we’ve already been knocked down for like hundreds and hundreds of years and here we are trying to do the right thing by sustainability in a place where it really matters… I just feel so much more warmly about this place and about this job and just wanting OU to succeed in this area and it’s very personal for me.”

Sonia has overseen a wide array of projects in here time here. She’s the one responsible for OU’s landmark composting initiative, presenting the idea when just two other universities had in-vessel (machine) composting systems, claiming that the university’s composting system is still the largest of any university. Currently, the department is focusing on Earth Month, which occurs at the University every April, this year focusing on food issues.


View Sustainability at Ohio University in a larger map

On March 15, 2007, Ohio University President Roderick McDavis signed the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, a pledge to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions that has been signed by 675 universities so far. Established in part to help fulfill the University’s new commitment, the President’s Advisory Council for Sustainability Planning was established in July 2009 to construct a multi-phase plan to tackle sustainability issues with input from a diverse selection of students, faculty and staff over the course of two years. The operation is headed by a Sustainability Council featuring notable members from around campus. Sonia Marcus co-chairs the council along with Ben Stuart, a civil, chemical, and environmental engineer from the Russ College of Engineering.

As Ben sits down in his office to speak about the council's progress, a line of students gathers outside his office to consult him. He's the guy responsible for innovating the process to draw petroleum from algae, which could be used to create organic plastics and bio-fuels. He knows what he's talking about when we speak sustainability, and he brings a completely different outlook to the council from Sonia.

"Universities are businesses in many respects," he explains, "Their main consideration is economic and so therefore if they can identify waste as lost money they develop plans to mitigate that loss." It's not what everyone wants to hear, and perhaps it's not the way it should be, but Ohio University is an institution in the grips of massive debt. We may pride ourselves on righteousness, but goodwill can't push the gravy train alone. Instead, the rational solution is to find a way to create progressive change within the system.

"I'm not really big on why you're doing what you're doing," Ben says, "I understand that some people come to it with a more altruistic attitude, but if action is caused by profit motive — I'm not against that."

The council time line from their website.

The council is operating in three stages. The first was "goal setting", in which general long-term and potentially unachievable goals are established. Last December, while many students and council members were home for break, the council put forth four goals. They were:

1. Ohio University will be a leader in campus and community
   sustainability. (Leadership)
   
2. Ohio University will actively promote ecological literacy and
   citizenship among its students, staff and faculty. (Education)
   
3. All members of the Ohio University community will have equal access
   to and responsibility for environmental amenities and disamenities. (Justice)
   
4. Ohio University’s operations will be grounded in ecological stewardship
   and will support healthy and diverse ecosystems. (Stewardship)
   

You'll notice that the word climate is absent from the goals. A last goal, "Ohio University will achieve climate neutrality" was proposed. It would've been aimed at meeting the climate commitment the president signed in 2007 but, ultimately, it was decided by the council that the goal would instead become part of the Climate Action Plan.

The second stage is to establish objectives, which include specific dates and performance indicators. The goals are handed down to a eight work groups tasked with addressing the goals in their specialized fields. The groups are Academics & Curriculum, Low & No Cost Energy Conservation, Dining, Transportation, Procurement, Energy Infrastructure/Utilities, Fundraising & Endowment, and Buildings & Grounds. Each is chaired by an individual not part of the Sustainability Council, so that the council itself cannot have too much control over the work groups.

"We didn't want any perceived bias coming in," Ben says. "We wanted all the members to be independent and contribute."

By the end of June, those groups will submit their objectives so that specific strategies can be devised and refined throughout the 2010-2011 school year which would see implementation by the end of spring.

It seems like a drawn out and bureaucratic process, but the rational was to devise a system that allows all of the voices of the university to be heard (you can let yours be known on their comment page) and develops strategies as close to implementation as possible so as not to become outdated.

As the consequences of ignoring our environmental impact become too apparent for reasonable people to ignore, society looks to the universities for innovative leadership and solutions. To reverse the neglect that has devastated much of Southeast Ohio, the people will look to Ohio University to set the tone and avoid further damage.

“The thing about the United States is — and about American culture is — is that we’ve become very adept at kind of hiding things that we’re not interested in actually confronting," Sonia says, "We don’t necessarily always deal with them; we just become more sophisticated at hiding them… in a way sustainability and sustainable living are about deliberately exposing yourself to things you want to be sure you’re keeping in mind.”

As members of the University, we must all do our part to feed the discussion, but the impact that the Sustainability Council can have on this university's actions is undeniable.

[Staff pictures of Marcus and Stuart provided by the PACSP site.]

The "Rise Above Plastics" campaign urges us to cut down plastic dependence.

Image by Rise Above Plastics campaign

Here's an organization that understands how to get the attention of college students. Rise Above Plastics is a non-profit organization aimed at raising public awareness of the effects that plastics can have on marine environments. They've done this in part by going on a world tour with Jack Johnson and getting him to record a song about their cause. Sounds like a good nonprofit to work for.

They've also got a very dynamic website with great illustrations like the one above to catch the eye. Then there's this advertisement they made, which is very much worth watching.



I spoke briefly about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in my last post on the dangers of disposables. Accidentally discovered by Charles Moore in 1997, the 10 million square mile floating dump is the result of an estimated 3.5 million tons of plastic and other waste pulled by currents from China, the continental United States, and the Hawaiian islands. There's no clear method to effectively clean up the small plastic pieces that are already there and the plastics enter the food chain when they are eaten by small fish and birds that mistake them for food.

In recent years, the density of the trash has risen dramatically — with plastics outnumbering plankton 46:1 in some places. According to Rise Against Plastics, it's estimated that over one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed every year from plastic entanglement or ingestion.

And it doesn't end there. Bisphenol A, a chemical common in plastics, breaks down into the water supply causing defects in wildlife similar to those caused by estrogen. It only takes a small amount to disrupt the endocrine system and cause severe defects to animals. In the video below, they discuss an equally disturbing problem caused by Bisphenol A. Researchers tested a variety of brand new plastic baby bottles by letting water sit in them for a period of time, after which every sample returned the chemical. After washing the bottles, the amounts detected were even higher.



As the video says, plastic producers dispute the claims and point to the FDA's support for backup, but increased awareness has caused the FDA to take a second look at the chemical. In January of this year, the FDA put out a statement saying:

Studies employing standardized toxicity tests have thus far supported the safety of current low levels of human exposure to BPA However, on the basis of results from recent studies using novel approaches to test for subtle effects, both the National Toxicology Program at the National Institutes of Health and FDA have some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children.

As a result, they have levied support for "the industry’s actions to stop producing BPA-containing baby bottles and infant feeding cups for the U.S. market" and urged researchers to develop BPA alternatives for infant food cans and other food can linings.

How can you reduce your contribution to plastic waste problems? The Rise Above Plastics offers 20 tips for reducing your plastic intake, including:

1. Stop using plastic water bottles in favor of refillable ones.
2. Bring a reusable bag for grocery shopping.
3. Avoid single serving packaging.
4. Stop using plastic sandwich bags.
5. Bring a to-go mug to coffee shops.
6. Buy music online instead of purchasing CDs with plastic cases.
7. Avoid single serving packaging... again. (What do you expect from a bunch of surf bums?)
8. Use silverware instead of disposable forks.
9. Seek out items that aren't made out of plastic. (Okay, they're getting lazy here.)
10. If you must use plastic, try to use plastic types one (PETE) or two (HDPE) which are the most easily recycled plastics.

Just because it's disposable does not mean it's going away.

Hot tip: Cut down old disposable forks to make it appear as if they're attacking you. Great for blogs!

When I began this blog, I did so hoping to gain some valuable insight into today's pressing environmental issues — knowledge that would make me into a better individual. I've learned a lot, and I'm pleased to report that my lifestyle has become more sustainable, if only mildly. One side effect though, that I neither foresaw or have since been able to remedy is my knowledge of the adverse effects that disposable items can have on the environment.

My inherent and unshakable neuroticism comes alive anytime I try to get food. It seems that there is no such thing as a reusable straw in the world, and with fast food and take out the norm in our modern society, nearly any meal you pick up will involve something throw away — plastic silverware, wrappers, foil, tiny sauce packets. Short of bringing my own silverware around town (which now seems like a better idea than I thought as I wrote it) disposable items are nearly unavoidable.

Most of our disposable items are made from plastics which, while cheap, can take hundreds of years to biodegrade, taking up valuable space in landfills and seeping toxins into nearby groundwater and soil all the while. They require petroleum to produce, and their manufacturing contributes to global warming.

When dumped into the ocean, plastics don't ever break down completely. Instead they go through a process known as photodegradation, where plastics break down into smaller and smaller parts while still remaining a polymer, eventually reaching the molecular level. The garbage in our water supplies caused by thrown away plastics is responsible for the now infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, in the North Pacific. These minute plastic particles enter the food supply when they become small enough to be consumed by small fish, eventually working their way up the food chain to larger creatures, humans included.

And the health effects go beyond contaminated seafood. Plastic plates and containers are synthesized with carcinogenic chemicals that, when microwaved, can mix into our food. Phthalates, which help make plastics flexible, have been shown to affect the male reproductive system in children.

As with most environmental use problems, there are simple solutions that can you can do to cut dramatically into your impact. Tipnut's got a great list of 20 products you can use twice before tossing — from writing notes and grocery lists on old envelopes to reusing cardboard egg cartons as homemade fire starters. An article on HubPages boldly directs us to stop using disposable toilet paper, feminine products, and shampoo. People find it gross, but cloth handkerchiefs are a completely normal way to stop the spread of germs while saving trees from a terrible end.

There is an endless supply of clever ideas when it comes to reuse. Any ideas from the readers for the other readers?

First Blood

I’ve been a vegetarian for over a month now and I still spell it “vegit”. When I started, I decided that after a month I’d go back to meat so I could have a few weeks left in with project to write about local meats. That time has come.

After 33 days, I probably thought about what my first meaty meal would be 99 times. I thought about getting a two-pound burger or a hanger steak, but I decided whatever it was needed to be local. Both the Farmacy and Seaman’s sell local meats, and you can pick it up from the Farmer’s Market if you’re so inclined, but Seaman’s and I have become inseparable in the past month so I threw them the honor.

Local meat is definitely a luxury you pay for. Unless you were looking for a heart, there wasn’t anything that appeared to be worth its weight. For example, I picked up four Black Angus beef patties from Red Bird Ranch, 1.33lbs of meat, for $8.63. This stuff was quality though. The meat I picked up was dry aged four weeks, never treated with growth hormones or raised in confinement, given minimum antibiotics and claimed to be marbled at or above top choice standards. They even displayed the name of the family, the Lackeys, right on the fridge.

I topped the burger with American cheese from Walnut Creek Foods (out of Walnut Creek, OH), pickles from Tony Roma’s (out of Toledo), lettuce, a tomato slice, and yellow mustard. I filmed the process, and first bite below:



I was strangely hesitant to take that first bite. The thought of breaking my long and dedicated fast was difficult. I really accomplished something I never thought I would do, proving that I love journalism more than meat in the process.

Afterward, my stomach did hurt a bit from the meat. It was a sharp pang in the gut, but a good one. This meat is fantastic if you can afford it. It's absolutely savory, juice packed, top-shelf stuff.

In the future, I'm trying to only eat meat once a day. Unfortunately, I failed this goal on my first day back. I couldn't resist a hot grinder's salami at the dining hall, and when I stopped by Chipotle later, the only thought in my mind was how long it must have been since I'd tasted barbacoa.

The most difficult days are ahead. Without much of the motivation I had before, and without being a true vegetarian, it's proving difficult to avoid meat. Once I get over my animalistic cravings, I'm hoping I'll be able to cut back a bit.