U of T’s Sustainability Office celebrated its first anniversary last Thursday with an open house of talks and exhibits on how it has been attempting to make U of T a more ecologically aware place.
The event showcased the office’s unassuming but determined initiative: to institutionalize sustainable practice on campus through energy reduction projects.
Speaking at the open house, Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone used an initiative called the green-roofs project as an illustration of a successful joint venture between the Sustainability Office and the city. Green roofs are vegetated roof covers, or living roofs, constructed across a roof deck.
“Nature is out there. Work with it and it will give you air conditioning,” said Pantalone.
The Environmental Protection Advisory Committee (EPAC) created the Sustainability Office in 2005 with financial support from the Office of the Vice President and Provost as well as the government Toronto Atmospheric Fund. At the open house, Vice President Vivek Goel announced that the university will continue funding the office for another two years.
At the office, located in the Earth Sciences Centre, a collective of faculty, students, and staff, who in a work-study or volunteer capacity, try to foster energy efficiency on campus.
“By offering students support and the infrastructure for their projects,” sustainability coordinator Chris Caners said, “the Sustainability Office becomes a resource for dedicated students with good ideas.”
One example of student environment initiatives across campus are the Anti-Idle Campaign, which in partnership with the university’s parking authority attempts to improve the air quality. Another is The Bike Chain, a free, educational bike-repair facility that aims to satisfy the office’s objectives by helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The office also runs Rewire, which is an attempt to “educate” the campus into behaving more sustainably by installing energy meters on campus, and monitoring the efficiency of U of T’s energy consumption. Rewire works according to a self-determination theory that suggests that there exist normative barriers that inhibit people from making environmentally conscious choices.
Programs like The Bike Chain and Rewire “campaign to help people reduce and moderate energy use,” Canters said, “in part by fighting the barriers to change.”
But a multi-faceted, energy-efficient Toronto campus is the only the first stage of a more sweeping vision for the Sustainability Office. As the largest landowner in Toronto, the office hopes that U of T will serve as a viable, environmentally sustainable and economically efficient system that could be adopted by other local and national institutions.
