The New Southwest / UA makes strides in sustainability

UA makes strides in sustainability

By Alan M. Petrillo

Tucson Green Times – January 2010

The University of Arizona, which has a number of sustainability efforts under way on and off the campus, has created a virtual school for sustainability that spans five of its colleges.

The School for Sustainability encompasses the College of Engineering, College of Architecture, the Eller College of Management, the James E. Rogers College of Law, and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, according to Glenn L. Schrader, associate dean for research at the College of Engineering and chair of the UA Campus Sustainability Committee.

“We’re creating educational courses for students to work on to do their thesis by networking among existing colleges and schools at the university,” Schrader says. “We’re starting with undergraduates in the senior design class and we hope that by next year the program also will encompass graduate students.”

The Campus Sustainability Committee was formed by UA president Robert Shelton in 2007 as the main working arm for sustainability on the campus.

Schrader points out that while the School for Sustainability is a new program, the concept and vision of the school have been discussed for a couple of years.

“The Campus Sustainability Committee vision is to create a living laboratory on campus for best practices,” Schrader says. “These would be projects that make a difference, as well as educational programs and outreach projects to the community so we all can learn how to practice sustainability.”

Schrader notes that the University is trying to do the kinds of things that make a difference in everyday life, which he called the “spirit behind the school.”

Besides, he says, “As a land grant school, we’re very much down-to-earth here, so test projects and test demonstrations are at the heart of what we do. We want to do things both on and off campus to demonstrate that we can save water, energy and materials.”

The concept of a Practice School is one that has extended through education for many years, Schrader maintains. He points to law schools where students clerk for attorneys or judges and engineering schools where students work with private sector engineering firms.

“Some of the engineering professions began as practice schools where the knowledge was then transferred to real world experience,” he says.

One of the University projects being developed involves solar energy.

“Solar energy will be very important to us in southern Arizona and most people don’t realize that our high temperatures could cause some problems,” Schrader says. “Typical photovoltaic (PV) devices start to lose considerable efficiency as the temperature gets higher and higher.”

Because of those issues, the school is looking at techniques that can cool PV devices on rooftops.

“This fall term we have 40 seniors exploring ways to water cool and air cool these PV devices, and in the spring we’ll do a more in-depth design that our facilities and operations people can put into a demonstration project on top of one of our buildings,” Schrader says. “If we can get 5 to 10 degrees cooler, it would have a significant effect.”

And in the instance of cooling down a PV device with water, Schrader says the project probably could use the heat generated by the process to heat water, which essentially would provide a double savings to the project.

Another series of projects the School is developing for next year involves desalination, something that Schrader believes southern Arizona will have to examine in the very near future.

“A lot of the water we import brings a lot of salt with it,” he says. “The CAP (Central Arizona Project) brings water from the Colorado River to the Tucson basin and the salt goes into our aquifers. “We may have to remove that salt in the future with low energy desalination processes.”

Schrader points out that while students get course credit for taking sustainability courses and participating in projects, the university hopes in the future to have a certificate program for sustainability to add to a student’s regular diploma.

“We’re also looking at master’s and PhD degrees getting two diplomas,” he says, “one in the science or professional area and the other in sustainability.”

For outreach projects, Schrader says the school has been working with Mark Apel, area associate agent at Arizona Cooperative Extension, part of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

“Our job is to take what the University is generating and bring it out to different communities in the state,” Apel says.

Cooperative Extension has offices in every county in the state and hosts a wide range of programs, including youth development, land use planning, sustainable development, family and consumer sciences, sustainable agriculture practices, and horticulture and master gardener programs.

Apel says Cooperative Extension surveyed its offices this past fall to determine how far it has come in delivering sustainable living ideas and education to its clients.

“We’re evaluating that data to see where our sustainability concepts are being delivered now and how they are imbedded or incorporated into our extension programs,” Apel says. “At this point it appears we have got sustainability messages out there to the public, so now our task is to figure out where the gaps are in our messages and how we might take advantage of other sustainability efforts happening on campus.”

Apel says Cooperative Extension hopes to host a summit on campus in the spring to bring together speakers from different departments with extension agents to exchange ideas and develop ways to collaborate on sustainability concepts.

The research arm of the University of Arizona in the area of sustainability is the Institute of the Environment, co-directed by Diana Liverman and Jonathan Overpeck.

“We’re really a coordinating structure for the 300 faculty in almost every college at the university working on the environment,” says Liverman. “We have approximately 20 staff, including those working on the web, administration and projects. We bring people together from across the campus, organize events, put together collaborative proposals and encourage the administration to make environmental hires.”

Liverman believes the most important thing the Institute has done for the University was investing in hiring environmental faculty.

“Over the last five or six years, we must have hired nearly 60 environmental faculty in various departments,” she says. “And we will be hiring another dozen environmental faculty, especially in the energy and energy policy areas, which will complement what we’re doing on the solar side of things.”

Liverman notes that in the past year the campus has restructured around the environment.

“They’ve created a new school for environmental science in the College of Science that’s brought together geosciences, hydrology, tree ring and atmospheric sciences,” she says. “That will be one of the best science departments in the whole county.”

A similar evolution happened in the College of Engineering, she adds, where a sustainable engineering initiative was created that brings together a half-dozen engineering departments to focus on issues of environmental sustainability.

In addition, Liverman says, the School of Natural Resources, the College of Law, the School of Family and Consumer Science, the College of Agriculture and the Eller College of Management all are offering courses on environmental issues and partnering in environmental activities.

Author: Alan Petrillo is a local freelance writer.