The Sustainable Hopkins Infrastructure Program (SHIP) started, literally, in the toilet.
SHIP, an organization that unites students, faculty, and staff to fund fiscally and environmentally responsible projects, took off in 2009 with a project that replaced the thirty-five year old toilets in the MSE library with new ones that used a third as much water. The project cost $15,000 and will pay itself back in three to four years.
Sean Murphy, student director of SHIP said, “There’s always unforeseeable constraints, aside from just funding, that can stymie a project.”
Since emerging from the proverbial and literal toilet, SHIP has approved $200,000 of projects. Students need only present a detailed plan to the deans of finance, who are part of the Evaluations Committee of the organization, and the university will fund it as long as the project pays itself off within seven years.
Joanna Gawlik, who promoted environmental action and awareness as part of last year’s ECO-rep team, captures the attitude.
“Here’s the economic incentive to do it, here’s the environmental incentive, and so why not just do it,” she said.
The administration has demonstrated a commitment to sustainability and a willingness to listen to the student body. But funding, as well as other problems are preventing Hopkins from fulfilling its vision of a green campus.
Some obstacles are purely logistical. Although the seals on some old buildings on campus are inadequate and cost the university thousands in heating, SHIP was unable to install new storm windows in Ames because the proposed design would trap moisture in the building and create rot.
Likewise, a proposal made by ECO-Reps last year to make the to-go trays in the Fresh Food Café reusable was denied on the grounds that it would violate the health codes, despite the fact that other schools have implemented similar programs.
SHIP once ran into problems when it tried to establish recycling bins that clashed with the 19th century Georgian red-brick aesthetic of the Homewood campus.
Another frustrated project is intended to address energy usage in the cold rooms in Mudd, where researchers store chemicals and perform temperature-sensitive experiments. These rooms require a water flow of one to three gallons per minute, which adds up to 30 million gallons and $170,000 of water a year. The project proposes a closed loop with heat exchangers so that the water could be continuously recycled. However, SHIP has had difficulty getting a professional engineer to give the project a stamp of approval.
Hopkins faces unique environmental challenges simply from being a large research university.
“Each school is dealt a different hand of cards that they have to deal with,” Murphy said.
For Hopkins, this means having to meet the energy demands of many research laboratories as well as coordinating sustainability efforts over several disparate campuses.
Leana Houser, Sustainability Coordinator for the university, describes in an email to The News-Letter how Hopkins is overcoming these challenges.
“Fortunately,” she writes, “we have been able to bridge Johns Hopkins’ many campuses and divisions by building relationships with champions within each division and developing a shared vision of sustainability. The Johns Hopkins Sustainability Committee is a great example of this effort and has led to a university-wide greenhouse gas inventory, the Implementation Plan for Advancing Sustainability and Climate Stewardship and a soon to be published Sustainability Report which will document the successes of one Johns Hopkins rather than individual campuses and divisions as we have traditionally seen.”
The success of other projects depends on the behavior of the students and faculty. There is a strong base of student groups involved in environmental action, but the majority of students remain unaware of the university’s efforts.
Of ten people approached at the MSE library, only one had heard of the Hopkins Sustainability Initiative, which is an umbrella term used by the Sustainability Office and student environmental groups to describe the university’s efforts towards becoming greener.
However, there is reason to be proud of the students and the administration for the many successes of their work towards sustainability.
As Houser notes, “It was the students who rallied for a commitment by JHU to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions in 2007, which led to the creation of the President’s Task Force on Climate Change.”
Just this past March, the President’s Task Force released the Implementation plan for Advancing Sustainability and Climate Stewardship, which focuses on a 15 year plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions in half. It was also students, aided by the Office of Sustainability, who initiated SHIP.
Another successful project involves the instillation of a control system on the fume hoods in the New Chemistry Building. Whereas the fume hoods currently use hundreds of thousands of dollars of electricity each year, the new system will reduce the energy expenditure of the hoods by rewarding users for keeping the hoods down.
Murphy explains that although the administration was initially reluctant to commit $70,000 to a project that was contingent on user behavior, the project was successfully approved.
“I think there’s a lot of worry that if you try to force some new technology or new manner of behavior onto people, that they’re not going to respond in kind, and it’ll be a disaster,” explains Murphy, “but [the researchers and graduate students] were actually pretty receptive” to the new system.
Despite the obstacles, student leaders and administrators alike are optimistic about the future.
Murphy has high hopes for this year’s Green Idea Generator event, which will occur at the end of Green Week in October. The Green Idea Generator allows students to develop and present ways to make a tangible impact on campus sustainability.
One year it lead to an initiative to install a boiler in the Wyman Park Building that would use vegetable waste from campus kitchens. Murphy anticipates a greater showing of people this year and hopes especially that the younger classes will show as much enthusiasm as they have in the past
New this year will be the “Every Job is a Green Job” campaign, which encourages faculty and staff to incorporate sustainability into their everyday working routines.
“We believe it isn’t what you do but how you do your job that makes it green,” Houser said. “The simplicity of this message makes its success very promising.”
The next step for the university is to incorporate its vision of sustainability into every action it takes, in Gawlik’s words “to make an effort to have this intertwined into what Hopkins already does.”
For example, if a building is remodeled, green dual-flush toilets should automatically be part of the plan. As an institution with a strong presence in Baltimore and the country as a whole, Hopkins has the potential and the responsibility to meaningfully influence environmental policy.
Murphy sees the administration putting more and more confidence in the students, especially as SHIP aims for increasingly larger projects.
“They realize we’re not bullsh**ting them,” he says, “Once we got those toilets in, they were like, ‘these kids are actually going to do stuff.’”
