Earlier this year, the School of Medicine brought together representatives from each department to launch a school-wide energy awareness drive. But the group’s enthusiasm and ideas led it to go beyond its initial focus to the broader realm of sustainability.
The Sustainability Awareness Committee (SAC) now focuses on encouraging behavior change and saving money and resources in energy, dining services, recycling and procurement, transportation and sustainable design. The committee will provide information and tools to help the School of Medicine community positively impact all of these areas at work and at home, said Jim Stueber, director of facilities engineering.
Photo by Robert Boston
Jerry Pinkner, research lab manager in molecular microbiology, with 2 months of boxes collected from three labs to be recycled. This amount of cardboard would fill half of the regular trash Dumpster that would normally go into landfills, Pinkner said. A pilot recycling program will recycle the cardboard in three medical school buildings.
The subcommittee, headed by Jerry Pinkner, research lab manager in molecular microbiology, has been hard at work on several initiatives.
The subcommittee, composed of representa-tives of nine departments on the Danforth and Medical campuses, plans to generate a recommendation list of laboratory best practices on how to save energy.
A recent case study of a lab in the McDonnell Pediatric Research Building showed that about $2,000 per year could be saved by turning off lab equipment such as water baths, heat blocks, centrifuges and other equipment with heating elements and compressors when not in use. Lighting modifications alone could save nearly $1,000 annually.
Pinkner said there is another simple change that could save big money.
“Labs could save 40 cents an hour, or $3,500 a year, by closing the fume hood sashes,” Pinkner said. “Leaving them open is like leaving your front door at home open in the summer or in the winter.”
Based on the case study, if the same level of savings could be reached in all of the 570,000 square feet of labs at the medical school, the school could save more than $2 million a year, resulting in a more than 7 percent reduction in energy costs campuswide.
The subcommittee, working with Ivory Reed Jr., director of support services, has launched a pilot recycling program in the McDonnell Pediatric Research Building, which will spread to the Clinical Sciences Research Building (CSRB) and CSRB North. The University pays more than $70,000 a year to recycling contractors to take away white office paper and aluminum cans, glass and plastics.
“The buildings serving the CSRB trash Dumpster alone produce more than 30 tons of trash a month,” Pinkner said. “We feel more than half of this can be recycled, reducing trash expenses and our waste stream to landfills by half and saving another $60,000 a year.”
Under the pilot program, all paper products will be collected and sold for profit. The money made from selling the paper will pay to recycle the glass, plastic, cans and cardboard.
The PC subcommittee, headed by Jill Mantia, director of information systems for the Department of Medicine, has been studying configuration schemes to turn off computers during nonwork hours to save energy without impacting academic and administrative faculty and staff who may log in outside of work hours.
The group is starting with the computers in the 4480 Clayton Ave. building. Using power meters, the team will determine how much energy is saved when it implements the schemes on all the computers in the building, Mantia said.
The group also is looking at implementing its findings on the high number of computers in the Bernard Becker Medical Library.
Once the data is gathered, the subcommittee plans to develop best practices for computing on the campus, Mantia said.