Business View - January 2016 55
and the first one in Michigan. Grand Valley was also
named “One of the Country’s Greenest Universities”
by the Sierra Club for the third year in a row - the high-
est ranked Michigan institution on the list.
Documenting the energy savings accrued from apply-
ing best sustainability practices in his domain is what
Christopher calls the “applied research; the work side
of sustainability.” And, however pedestrian the gather-
ing of data may be, that type of research does provide
the key metrics which help prove - with actual numbers
- what best sustainability practitioners have long been
promising. “Most of the research work we do is direct-
ed to documentation of energy savings and other en-
vironmental stewardship metrics,” he says. “We have
the numbers of what we looked like consuming energy
in 2003 as a baseline, so we now know exactly where
we stand 12 years later.”
Yumiko Jakobcic is the Office of Sustainability Practic-
es’ Campus Sustainability Manager. Her statement of
overall energy savings over the past years is succinct:
“We’ve been able to reduce our energy use quite a bit,”
she says. In fact, over the past fifteen years, GVSU has
reduced its electrical consumption by 26.5 percent,
natural gas consumption by 27.5 percent, and water/
sewer by 42.7 percent on a square foot basis. James
Moyer, Associate Vice President for Facilities Planning
comments, “We realized that we had little control over
the cost of energy, but we could control the amount
we used. We embarked on a campus wide effort to
control use.” Christopher attributes some of the water
consumption reduction to “new drainage and aquifers
and irrigation ponds that we didn’t have that now pro-
vide water for our recreation fields and other places.”
Moyer adds, “We also realized that we had to control
water consumption as part of the energy control ef-
CLEAN & GREEN
