GRAYS HARBOR COLLEGE

SUSTAINABILITY COMMITTEE

Minutes

Thursday – OCTOBER 21, 2010 – 4:30PM

200 BUILDING MEETING ROOM

  1. Attendance – Welcome to Guests
  2. Lorena Marchant, Julie Nelson, Kenji Seta, Janelle Spaulding, Jessica James, Kim Jones, Tom Kuester, Holly Mattson, Todd Bates
  1. Introduction of Jessica James and Kim Jones(AmeriCorps)
  2. Jessica in particular will be involved with the Sustainability Committee this year.
  1. Review of previous year’s work
  2. Looking at Recycling and Sustainability on campus. We did a recycling audit to see how the recycling program has been going. We completed a 70 page institutional footprint project. We worked on but couldn’t complete becoming a tree campus last year.
  3. We have been successful with Earth Day celebrations and restoration projects.
  1. Opportunity for opening comment(s)
  2. Kim- Restoring the model watershed and getting rid of invasive plants.
  3. Jessica- Cutting recycling down further than 30%.
  4. Janelle- Continue the sustainability tip of the week (Todd brought this up as well)
  5. Janelle- Find out how much energy is used by handicapped door buttons by those who don’t need it.
  6. Kenji- Encouraging people to use the stairs instead of wasting energy on the elevator.
  7. Kenji-Any thoughts about composting?
  8. We are not doing food waste composting but we do landscaping composting.
  9. Kenji- Gothic fonts use less ink and we could save a lot of money and toner use.
  10. We switched the printers that we could to double sided
  11. ?-Promote double sided printing and copying.
  12. Lorena- We have discouraged people from putting fliers in every mail box.
  13. Kenji- Using smaller margins and lighter copy modes
  14. Todd- We could possibly default the copy machines to print double sided and use a lighter setting.
  15. Todd- Continue to celebrate Earth Day and National Campus Sustainability Day as two nice events to bookend the year.
  16. Tom- PUD and Federal incentive programs need to be advertised and the community needs to be aware of them. (Tax credits, rebates, ect…)
  17. Kim- Some students do not even know what compact fluorescent light bulbs are, we could educate them.
  18. Julie- Food composting could attract critters and incur more cost for the college but the sustainability tip of the week.
  19. Holly- I like Jessica’s idea to increase recycling, we could put the sustainability tips of the week on the TV’s in the HUB
  20. Lorena- There is a sustainability blog that has archived tips of the week and minutes.
  21. Lorena- I would like to educate people about recycling so we can spread further across the campus.
  22. Tom- We could create a new category for campus alerts.
  1. Monthly meetings- schedule for the year
  2. Lorena- Maybe we could do a survey on survey monkey to figure out a time.
  1. Sustainability Tip of the Week
  2. Signup sheet going around.
  3. Reminder will go out a week before.
  4. Get the tips to Jessica by Monday the week they are due.
  1. New business
  2. Sustainability Action Plan (WACC and Learn and Serve America)
  3. We received a grant called the NW sustainability initiative. This grant will allow us to go to other schools to see how they are doing and going to conferences as well.
  4. As a part of this grant we must create a sustainability action plan.
  5. Possibly change the sustainability committee to a sustainability action team so that we can include outside partners.
  6. Tom- we should start out with a prioritized list rather than a grandiose document so that it will be manageable in our small institution.
  7. Conference in San Diego to integrate service learning into STEM disciplines.
  8. Washington Campus Compact Field Trips (First one Friday October 29th to Evergreen: Dialogue for Democracy)
  9. This is a quarterly event. We will be visiting other schools. South Puget Sound is about a year ahead of us as far as Service Learning goes.
  10. Service Learning- We will be spending time talking to instructors and trying to increase and implement service learning projects in STEM disciplines. Be on the lookout for Lorena bending your ear.
  11. Subcommittee work groups: Energy, Transportation, Purchasing, Food Service, Events, Landscaping/Community Gardening
  12. There are not enough people on this committee to have five working groups so Jessica and Kim will be point people for those five groups so you can sign onto those that you are interested.
  13. Rotaract is the college equivalent of Rotary and getting a branch started could really help us with projects like this.
  14. Natural Resources Club is active and getting started and may be interested. Kim and Jessica could probably come and speak.
  1. Next meeting
  2. The week of November 15th
  1. Adjourn 5:30