Sustainability & Technology

Sustainability is a very important issue, and is recognized as such throughout higher education. Some interesting higher education institutional statistics are as follows:

• 56% have full-time sustainability staff
• 61% have at least one building that has earned LEED certification
• 66% have hybrid or electric vehicles
• 33% have signed President's Climate Commitment

*Educause, 2009

Within the draft of the Strategic Plan for Technology, a "Go Green" goal lists some of our environmental initiatives. Some examples include:

• Reviewing EPEAT.NET (Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool) when researching technology products. (EPEAT evaluates electronic products based upon 51 environmental criteria. Products may be rated as bronze, silver, or gold dependent upon how many of the required an optional criteria they meet
• Implementing duplex printing (printing on both sides of a page) in ITS labs
• Switching to 100% post-consumer, recycled paper in ITS labs
  
• Retiring outdated servers and consolidating existing servers on new, high-performance platforms, running multiple virtual servers on a single piece of hardware
• Recycling retired technology hardware appropriately
• Reviewing the possibility of an alternative energy installation to power technology in some form
• Reducing power consumed by technology in labs and elsewhere across the academic campus

These steps will help us move toward a more sustainable environment