Cochrane says university green audit is important social obligation
When St. Thomas University interim president Dennis Cochrane was reading last year’s university student survey from The Globe and Mail, one category’s results surprised him.
“We were low on students’ comments regarding what STU does for the environment,” Cochrane said. “I came to the conclusion that we really weren’t doing enough.”
Cochrane approached Andrew Secord, chair of economics and coordinator of the environment and society program about doing an environmental audit of the university.
It will be the first environmental audit for STU.
The organization for the audit began with Cochrane’s president’s advisory committee on campus environmental issues. That’s where Marylynn Côté got involved.
Working on graduating this year with an interdisciplinary major in environmental studies and political science, Côté was looking for a work co-op for September. That’s when Secord approached her to help out with the audit by researching STU’s environmental impact.
“I have just been laying a lot of the ground work and doing a lot of background research because it hasn’t been done before,” Côté said. “We have a pretty good idea on how it works. We are basing our work on audits that have been done at other universities.”
Secord says he and Côté have already gathered much of the energy data. But there’s still lots to be done.
“There’s certain things you look for in the information you collect,” Secord said. “In things like your energy consumption, and how much you’re using for heating, electricity, how much is used in different buildings and also connect that to the environmental impact of the electricity that’s generated.
“We’ve done some things, but we haven’t sort of looked at okay, what’s our baseline, and that gives you sort of a starting point so you can evaluate how well you’re doing.”
They hope to have an initial report in May. If funding becomes available, Côté and Secord would like to continue the audit over the summer and have a complete report finished by September.
Based on the data collected, STU will work at reducing its environmental impact one step at a time.
Simple improvements like double-sided printing are easy improvements that will be cost efficient right away. Others, like re-insulating buildings, are investments that will take time.
But it’s an important investment, says Secord.
“Like, for example, if you’re buying electricity here it’s all from NB Power, so you would look at the environmental impact associated with their generating units in terms of greenhouse gases, disruption of the river systems with hydro damns, the generation of radio-active waste from nuclear power plants,” he said.
Recently, three other students have been hired through the STU JOBS program to help Côté with the research. The team hopes other students will be receptive to these environmental changes like they were to ones in the past like the bottled water referendum and the bus pass.
According to Cochrane, it’s changes like these that can be a real teaching and learning opportunity.
“When you think of our social obligation, this is important,” he said.
