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Business View Magazine
plan and create some action steps that will reduce our
carbon emissions 20 percent below our 2008 bench-
mark. We’ll invite students to participate, offering four
undergraduates a fellowship opportunity to develop pro-
fessional skills in energy planning and management.”
Heather Stearns is Southern’s Recycling Coordinator and
runs the Sustainability Office with Huminski. Says Stea-
rns: “The school has been very proactive with recycling
and waste reduction. We recycle everything from the
more ordinary “single-stream” waste, which is the co-min-
gled paper products, plastics, and metal containers that
are placed in campus recycling bins, to mattresses, bat-
teries, construction materials, bulky items, e-waste, and
unused paint. The university also has 13 new refillable
water stations and three EV recharging stations for elec-
tric cars. Even more than recycling, our goal is waste re-
duction - not creating the waste in the first place.” In that
vein, Stearns created and students manage the Swap
Shop, a free office supplies exchange. “Our ‘shoppers’
are mostly office interns and administrative assistants
in different departments and offices,” says Stearns. “We
have an online inventory, as well as an actual location.
We have binders, printer ink, pens and pencils, folders,
staplers, shredders, tape, thumbtacks, and much more.
We track inventory and savings. In two years, the Swap
Shop has saved the university $60,000, and we have
another $37,000 in the current inventory. It is a really im-
portant, hands-on, waste reduction project for students,
and if we hadn’t started it, nobody would have paid much
attention to the savings opportunity.”
“Southern students plant, maintain,
and manage volunteers at the cam-
pus community garden, and most
of the produce that’s grown there is
donated to soup kitchens in the city,”
Huminski says. The Geo Club has
adopted sustainability as its mission,
and they are the heart of many proj-
ects and initiatives on campus. For
example, they collect compostable
food scrap from volunteer offices and
departments across campus and use
it to fertilize the garden. They call this
project “Compost Happens!”
A more wide-reaching initiative is the
New Haven Urban Oasis Project, a
city-wide partnership with several community and nation-
al organizations, such as the New Haven Land Trust, the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Audubon Connecticut, and
Yale University’s Urban Resource Initiative. “We’re help-
ing develop a corridor of bird and pollinator-friendly habi-
tats that connect larger open spaces that border the city
to provide habitat for birds and pollinators, and encour-
age community involvement and awareness,” says Hu-
minski. “Because of our position in the northeast flyway,
New Haven has been recognized as one of 12 national,
urban wildlife refuges. That’s one of the bigger collabora-
tive efforts that we’ve been working on through the Office
of Sustainability. We also established a residential living
learning community themed around sustainability, and
