The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has recognized Santa Clara University as one of the top universities to reduce its carbon footprint. SCU ranked No. 16 on the EPA's Top 20 College & University List of green power purchasers.
“This recognition reflects our commitment to address climate change by supporting renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Lindsey Cromwell, Santa Clara University's sustainability coordinator.
The university committed to doubling its green power purchase to nearly 23 million kilowatt-hours (kWh), which represents 74 percent of the school's electricity use. That's enough to power 2,529 average American homes and equivalent to taking nearly 3,000 cars off the road for one year.
The purchase will be supplied from Green-e Energy certified renewable energy certificates sourced from wind farms around the country.
SCU adopted its Sustainability Policy in 2004, which devotes the university to sustainability through stewardship, education, and outreach.
“Santa Clara University has numerous opportunities to engage students in critical thinking about sustainability and climate neutrality - from the cup of fairly traded coffee they drink in the morning to their composition and rhetoric class discussion at noon, to the time they compost their food waste after dinner,” said Cromwell.
Other campus-wide initiatives include:
- Installing solar panels;
- Upgrading old windows, HVAC systems, lighting;
- Replacing old urinals and toilets with ones that are waterless or ones that use reclaimed water;
- Encouraging the use of reusable water bottles by providing water filling stations in populated campus locations;
- Creating a paperless writing center, where students can project text from their laptop onto an interactive whiteboard via Bluetooth technology.
To learn more about SCU's sustainability efforts, go to www.scu.edu/sustainability.
About Santa Clara University
Santa Clara University, a comprehensive Jesuit, Catholic university located 40 miles south of San Francisco in California's Silicon Valley, offers its 8,758 students rigorous undergraduate curricula in arts and sciences, business, and engineering, plus masters and law degrees, and engineering Ph.D.s. Distinguished nationally by one of the highest graduation rates among all U.S. masters universities, California's oldest operating higher-education institution demonstrates faith-inspired values of ethics and social justice. For more information, see www.scu.edu.
About EPA's Green Power Partnership
The Green Power Partnership is a voluntary program that encourages organizations to buy green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with purchased electricity use. The Partnership currently has more than 1,100 Partner organizations voluntarily purchasing billions of kilowatt-hours of green power annually. Partners include a wide variety of leading organizations such as Fortune 500 companies, small and medium sized businesses, local, state, and federal governments, and colleges and universities. For additional information, visit www.epa.gov/greenpower.
Contacts:
Santa Clara University
Connie Kim Coutain, 408-554-5126
408-829-4836
(cell)
ccoutain@scu.edu