Attempting to transform the place you work

This is just some ideas I emailed to my place of work, anyone of us can attempt to influence our place of work and at home towards sustainability.

- Become a leader in green job training to help students and this country stay competitive in the global marketplace.

- Bring out the expertise out of all individuals in this university and apply these ideas locally within the university instead of primarily exporting their ideas elsewhere. This will also help students absorb and practice what they learn better.

- Provide incentives to submit these cost saving suggestions by encouraging a spirit of competition. Giving out some sort of incentive for the top candidate of each really effective suggestion in an area (If an idea can save the company thousands of dollars, small price for a large return) and will get more people thinking.

Conservation ideas

Often departments act like separate silos and don’t think of the whole system, the students, or the taxpayer interest as their main priority. Department interest comes first, the good of the whole sometimes goes by the way side, and this can introduce lots of inefficiencies and bloat in an organization.

- For example, in our organization IT does not pay the electric bill, so the cost of energy is not figured into IT planning. By consolidating or centralizing and virtualizing Sharepoint/web servers/research servers you maximize efficiencies and utilize load balancing and virtualization to distribute the load. This also reduces need for duplicated expertise scattered over people who have many other responsibilities. When I went to Sharepoint training I recall two classes with about 30 administrators each, all were learning how to manage the servers from the hardware, application layer, security layer, and end user layer on top of their other responsibilities to the institution. This is extremely inefficient.

Have experts on all of these layers, utilizing each person’s expertise rather than scattering even more people in many directions, wasting time on duplicating skills, reinventing wheels, etc. If you centralize services such as these, you can now have a few experts manage a centralized server setup for the whole organization, doling out sub sites to departments and campuses, with one fail- over setup at a different location. Not to mention that departments can collaborate without having to reinvent the wheel, and you reduce network vulnerabilities and potentially expensive breaches.

- Use the underground river water for cooling system of data center. This may seem obvious, but it is not to everyone. To this day large air conditioning units are being put on roofs to cool the datacenters in the basements of buildings, while ground water (in our particular case just a few feet underneath the foundations) is running. The Spokane river is literally a stone throw away from this facility and yet this water is not being utilized for cooling. Google and Hanford were located near the Columbia river to take advantage of the water cooling as well as the cheap electricity from the nearby dams.

- To follow up on the paperless initiatives already started, transparency and visibility bring more awareness of waste. Don’t allow personal printers, have only departmental printers, this not only saves on printing costs/maintenance/tech support tickets, but also makes it less tempting for staff, faculty, and management to print non-university related things. Make sure full duplex printing is allowed and turned on and send out directions on how to access and use it. (Having been in IT support, I have seen a lot of people indulge in this behavior)

- Leaving non-essential electronics on at night, during holidays and weekends is a waste of university money, have facilities monitor departmental energy usage in the same way bandwidth usage is monitored. By publishing the usage numbers by department publicly you create transparency and accountability, which induces more mindfulness and awareness of energy use. Our organization is just starting to monitor electricity usage using the many available software on the market today.

- Avista has incentives for organizations that make use of system wide workstation hibernation.Their incentive last checked was 10 dollars per workstation.

- Find and eliminate phantom loads (copiers, printers, adapters not on powerstrips, projectors, etc)

- Make sure all new buildings use passive solar techniques; this is free energy saved in the winter and does not come at a cost of esthetics.

- Use passive solar water heating and geothermal heating and cooling.

- Save water, install or at least replace broken toilets with waterless urinals and dual flush toilets.

- Harvest gray water from roofs for supplemental irrigation.

- This may sounds small, but it nevertheless is reflective of the sometimes-wasteful institutional culture. Here in Spokane in older buildings, toilet paper rolls are thrown out after half or two-thirds is used, meaning in the trash by most janitorial staff. Leaving computers (many with dual monitors) on during nights and weekends costs about 90 dollars per computer per year, times several thousand computers, and you're talking tens of thousands of dollars down the drain, not pennies!

- If it is too expensive to recycle, go directly to the source, only accept vendors who sell containers (such as aluminum cans and glass) that can be recycled for money so there is not a negative cash-flow with recycling. While at it, only accept beverages and snacks that are wholesome and avoid frankenfoods which will ultimately have medical consequences and costs.

Some ideas may be small, but in the global and flattened marketplace America is competing with people who are willing to produce and serve for much less and also don't take these little things for granted. By not taking anything for granted we won’t marginalize the organization's future competitive edge. See "Living Companies" which outlive those companies that don't grow.

- Energy generation may be one of those things that is better to distribute or de-centralize. There is energy loss when importing from far away. Diversify and ad more redundancy in the portfolio of energy sources while becoming a more sustainable campus.

- Reclaim waste heat from the IT server rooms, campus restaurants etc to heat rooms that need extra heating for example by using heat exchangers or a sterling engine. Figuring out how best to do this can be another engineering student project/competition.

- Reuse all fryer oil for organization vehicle use (biodiesel or straight vegetable oil conversions), I have put over 25K miles on “free” waste vegetable oil on my truck with no problems. If you can’t do that, the oil can also be burned in a waste oil heater to generate heat in the winter, either way, it is usable energy.

- Put engineering students to work capturing energy generated from workout machines at the campus wellness/gym, it would not be that complicated for them to hook these machines up to alternators. Again, this sounds small, but people who work out on machines generate energy, why waste it? If anything, it turns the university in an exiting place to learn and directly apply that understanding.

- Put students to work on putting solar water heaters on roofs, this has a much quicker payback or return on investment than photovoltaic at this time.

- Don’t just export the energy efficient houses or cars that students enter into competitions, use this technology in new buildings and retrofit buildings with this new technology.

- Capture methane gas energy from the composting, dairy farms, and waste generated, again put the students to work right on their own campus rather than outside.

Landscaping

- Change to edible (useful and beautiful) landscaping instead of only esthetic landscaping.

- Save some on fossil fuel fertilizers, do mulching instead, and convert some of the lawn to producing vegetables, nuts and fruits, similar to the millions of victory gardens back during the Second World War.

- Landscape maintenance is being paid for already, so why can’t they help produce food, (generating extra income and avoiding imports of foods, while sending a self sufficient sustainable message to the students) while they are maintaining the grounds. Replace new or broken landscaping with edible landscaping (produce can then be sold by the cafeteria, sell fruit to vendors, or let the hotel and restaurant department do the vending, try to keep the money circulating within the university, similar to what the dairy is doing now)

Whole Systems Health

- Business has already found that for every dollar invested in employee health, you can save 3 dollars or more in health care costs (see link below). Yet, surplus sales at its last sale of February 13, this year, was selling high quality exercise equipment to off–campus users. There are lots of people on campus who would love to be able to do a little exercise on their lunch break instead of going off campus and paying a big fee to a gym. With that in mind, encouraging such practices as healthy eating, local diets, exercise, dance, yoga, tai chi and meditation will have long term pay-offs in terms of healthier, happier, more adaptable, and more resilient employees. Happy employees are hard workers too. See concrete cost/benefit cases for large organizations: http://www.welcoa.org/worksite_cost_benefit.html

Our country's new president said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…We will Transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age."

Rather than the idea of how do we keep business as usual the same old way without cutting jobs etc, what if this could be seen as an opportunity to change and the way we do business, to transform our institution into the change we wish to transmit into the world through our own example and through the graduating students?

There is a lot of collective knowledge and experience to tap into within this university's community and yet in various areas there is disconnect between what is being taught in the organization versus what the organization practices on their own campus.

This recession is an opportunity in this new era of interdependence, responsibility, humility, transparency, and openness. During this time of uncertainty people are more motivated to change if that would save job cuts etc, making people more likely to adopt new ideas and practices as well as give them some ownership in the future.