Talking Stick - July/August 2018 - 52

Student interns at Stanford led the .7 gpm
showerhead study.

This student helped lead implementation
of the green cleaning system for student
use in Stanford apartments.
PHOTO COURTESY OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Today's students are increasingly concerned
about waste reduction. They understand that
waste has to go somewhere and are interested
in knowing where . . .

CONTINUOUS
COMMISSIONING
"We often talk about new buildings we
are working on, but 90 percent of the
square footage we are going to deal
with for the next 50 years is already
built," says Dollard. "And some of the
most treasured buildings on our campuses are historic. How do we modernize to make these existing buildings work from both a sustainability
and end user perspective?" Jim Curtin,
principal for Solomon Cordwell Buenz
in Chicago, Illinois, agrees. "Universities build for the long haul, not short
term." He believes that continuous
commissioning is a next-gen trend on
the horizon to ensure that buildings
are performing as intended and as efficiently as possible. One example Dollard cited was a project at CSU where a

TALKING STICK

review of operations led to a simple adjustment in a building that saves $140
per day in utility costs in the winter
months. As Dollard explains, "When
we cool a building we use a chiller, and
the chiller dumps the excess heat to a
cooling tower. However, in the dead of
winter we discovered that the cooling
tower can supply cooling directly to the
building without having to operate the
chiller, which resulted in significant
energy savings." While the focus of
continuous commissioning is often on
energy and water reduction, assessment of existing building operations
can also help identify other forms of
waste. "Waste is waste," says Duane
Carter, director of sustainability at
Solomon Cordwell Buenz. "Whether
it is leftover food in a dining center,
a light left on, or wasted energy in a
building, it needs to be managed, operated, and maintained."

Today's students are increasingly
concerned about waste reduction. They
understand that waste has to go somewhere and are interested in knowing
where, says Jennifer Andrews, project
director at the Sustainability Institute
at the University of New Hampshire
in Durham. Andrews cites a project where her office partnered with
residence life to create an educational
campaign focused on waste reduction
and diversion rates. After two years,
housing saw a 26 percent reduction
in landfill waste because students and
staff were receptive to the message and
changed their behavior. Parineh notes
that students at Stanford express the
same concern. "We most frequently
hear from students about waste." To
address this concern, Stanford sorts
waste on campus into five streams to
maximize recycling and composting
opportunities and is currently working
on a display wall that shows a trash
chute enclosure so students can see
how various waste streams on campus
are collected rather than just magically
disappearing. Parineh envisions the
next-gen version of this living laboratory as an on-site material recovery
facility where waste streams collected
on campus are brought to be sorted
for recycling and composted on site to
achieve as close to zero waste as possible.
Living laboratories can be a powerful tool for connecting academic and
research efforts on campus to cocurricular learning within campus housing.
The more opportunities students have
to see, interact with, and lead realworld examples of sustainability, the
better equipped they will be to connect
that learning to their major and carry it
forward after graduation.

RESILIENCY
Resiliency in sustainability efforts
focuses on the ability of campus building systems to adapt to increasingly
harsh conditions. The Tooker House

Talking Stick - July/August 2018

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