Past Years Stewardship Initiatives

Past Years Stewardship Initiatives:

  • Worked at making opening picnic a low-waste event.
  • Apply and receiving O2 composter grant and having student group make two boxes in December.
  • Facilitating November 6th forum on food waste.
  • At faculty, meeting gave out recycling containers.
  • Reorganized the student Free Store area.
  • Although not a CSC project, with the renovation of Northlawn building to Keim Center the north side of campus now has
    • LED lighting in parking lot
    • LED lighting inside NL
    • Water fountains with water bottle fillers with electronic counters
    • Recycling and trash containers made out of 1120 milk jugs
    • Zone heating and cooling
  • Worked to make the Ad building Christmas break a LWE (low waste event) by not using paper plates
  • Added a link to our PaperCut software’s “Your Environmental Impact Dashboard” from both CSC and IT helpdesk page so users can see and compare their paper usage
  • Planned for a November 7th  student led Forum on sustainability with the student sustainability club
  • Again organized the “10 Day Give” to encourage students not to toss items at the end of the year.
  • Our group doesn’t get money from the college, but by selling old chairs, yearbooks, sport jerseys, CDs, textbooks, (etc things we saved from the trash) and then selling them we were able to raise $2000 in the 2014-15 school year.
  • Added boxes by recycle cans in Yost for people to put basketball programs to reuse
  • Created a Faculty/Staff “Give and Take Shelf”  of office supplies in the basement of Ad building by the Post Office
  • Student sustainability group had a “make your own”  upcycled Christmas ornaments event
  • Encouraged dining hall to switch to smaller napkins, and they did
  • Campus Facilities is trying out 4 foot tube LED lighting in place of florescent in one area
  • Had a renewed push to to let Facilities know when a room is not in use
  • Planned sustainability forum with learning stations
  • Installed “stuff swap” boxes in mods and elsewhere on campus
  • “Integration to Globalization” now a course – sustainability a component
  • Sustainability forum about how sustainability is incorporated into academics
  • Charles Hall/Lemons Center HVAC was broken into zones which allows specific areas to be on or off.  This not only improves efficiency but improves comfort.
  • A Student Sustainability Club has formed.
  • We have lost our outlet to give our dining hall food scraps to,  so we are looking into ways to compost food waste ourselves.
  • November 5th was, “Clean Your Plate Day” focused on reducing food waste.  All week long food waste was measured and reported.
  • November 8th had Sustainability Stations during the Friday Forum time.  Students could visit at 10 different stations.
  • President Keim ask his Administrative Assistant Cindy Loucks to do a study on how much we were saving by now having the “docket” papers for the Board of Directors meeting almost all electronic.  Cindy reported that we have moved from a a per meeting cost of $400 to $18 and have reduced meeting prep time from 12 hours to 5 hours.
  • In recent years we have worked at reducing paper usage.   The numbers are:
    2010 – 2011    1.394 million
    2011 – 2012    1.318 million
    2012 – 2013    1.2975 million
  • Used furniture donated to non-profit agencies
  • Member of AASHE
  • Have a Facebook page
  • Held a Trash Fashion show
  • Automatic computer shutdown at night
  • New recycling efforts:   Randy found two new places in Hutchinson that take old electronics and shredded paper.  These were two items that previously we didn’t have a place to recycle.  He has taken two van loads there this year.   Some of our shredded paper he is also putting into our compost area as well.
  • Randy has found a place in Wichita that will take old cds, cassette tapes and video tapes.  He is currently storing those items until he gets help to separate those media from other recyclables.
  • We are now purchasing batteries from Interstate Battery Center in Wichita, and they are also picking up old batteries.   They have taken about 10 gallons of assorted batteries since the beginning of this year, many of those were from off campus.
  • Dining hall waste.  In March of 2012 a waste audit showed we had over 100 lbs of food waste/napkins a day,    A new plan was implemented where a local farmer is taking all the waste produced in the kitchen for the feeding it to his chickens and a pig.    Waste from dining hall users is going into a composter set up in back of the facilities shop.  Besides this food and napkin waste from the cafeteria, we are also diverting some of the used paper towels from around campus and a good share of the shredded paper.
  • Sustainability Week is again scheduled for the first week in April.
  • 10-Day Give is again planned for the third consecutive year.   This has cut in half the amount of trash taken to the landfill as students moved out of the dorms in May
  • Earth Day scheduled for  April
  • Planning for the Northlawn renovation project is looking at sustainability measures in the areas of energy saving as well as options for generating our own energy for the building
  • Environmental Science is a new class offered this year
  • Facilities ordered  26 assorted led light bulbs from a vendor in China. We plan to use them in the scoreboards, the Friesen art gallery, etc.  They are between 3 and 7 watts and claim to last 6-8 years.
  • In efforts to reduce waste and increase recycling:
    April 2011 – 12 pick ups total (10 waste and 2 recycle), with a waste-to-recycle ratio of 5:1.
    April 2012 –  9 pick ups total (6 waste and 3 recycle), with a waste-to-recycle ratio of 2:1.
  • Shower heads in dorms were replaced by 1.5 gpm heads that use less water, but “feel the same”.
  • Gravel from roof replacements projects in the summer of 2012 was saved for future landscaping projects.
  • Paper use in 2011-12 was down nearly 8% over 2010-11 – an estimated 75,000 sheets – a stack nearly as high as the Ad Bldg.
  • As buildings have been renovated they have gotten energy efficient windows, furnaces and roof coverings
  • In 2002 the college began installing motion-sensing lights and replacing incandescent  lights with energy saving fluorescent lights.  This has cut electrical consumption while keeping lighting output constant
  • From 2002 to 2007 the college had a 23% decrease in natural gas usage and 20% decrease in electrical use.  An energy audit shows the college’s combined energy cost at 97 cents per square foot as compared to $1.30 to $1.90 at other Kansas colleges and universities.
  • Facilities dept has switched one of our cleaning products from an acid cleaner to a non-acid one – less harmful to our facilities being cleaned and more important, to our students who do most of the cleaning and it’s less expensive.
  • Most classes and some other groups like Hesston College Board of Overseers are using  Moodle, our learning management software to share more documents electronically  and not printing them
  • The dining hall as gone trayless which has cut down on food waste
  • The Advanced Physics class has been doing a energy management project each spring.  Recent projects have included a solar-powered golf cart, solar-powered lighting for one room in Charles Hall, solar cooking and an electric bicycle
  • April 2012, the Entrepreneurship class manufactured 58 rain barrels from recycled food grade barrels and donated the money to Mennonite Central Committee.
  • May 2011, furniture from Erb Hall renovation was donated to 20 non-profit agencies in Texas