The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, a member organization of colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada working to create a sustainable future, is helping to lead an effort to raise higher education’s green score.  According to today’s New York Times, colleges are doing the following things in their race to be the greenest campus:

• Setting dates by which they will be carbon-neutral
• Hiring sustainability coordinators
• Buying green power through offsets

In a contest sponsored by the EPA, athletic conferences competed to see who could by the most green power and the ivy leagues won, with a combined 221.6 million kilowatt hours for the past quarter. However,  colleges and universities are lagging behind in accomplishing more substantive actions.

“….some higher education officials worry that campuses are taking easy steps to win the label rather than doing the kind of unglamorous work — replacing air exchange systems, for example — that would actually reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. Some campuses are changing little more than their press releases. ‘I don’t think we really have the tools to quantifiably test who’s doing the best and who’s not,’ says David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College. “It becomes a publicity hype type of thing.’”

Universities are dragging their feet in doing the kind of infrastructure improvements that would really move the needle, like:

• Converting to alternative energy
• Changing over to hybrid fleets
• Retrofitting old buildings for efficiency
• Composting their food waste
• Offering sustainability throughout the curriculum

Let’s hope they can ramp up their efforts.

Image Credit: New York Times