Business View - January 2016 57
cilities. Facilities Planning has continually raised the
bar regarding green and LEED building standards and
applied sustainability best practices.
And even more monetary savings are on the way, as
the University, in partnership with Consumers Energy,
the local public utility, has just broken ground for a so-
lar “garden” to be built on the Allendale campus. The
university is serving as the host, while the utility com-
pany is taking care of the design, construction, and
maintenance of the solar garden. According to Jako-
bcic, the array of 11,000 photovoltaic, solar panels
will cover an area of 17 acres, providing about three
megawatts of power - the equivalent of the electricity
used by 540 average Michigan homes. The university
subscription amount is for 500kW and will be the larg-
est renewable energy endeavor thus far. When com-
plete by spring 2016, Christopher says the solar farm
will be the largest community solar photovoltaic power
generator in the state of Michigan to date using a dis-
tributed grid model.
In order to expand and reinforce the holistic nature
of the sustainability paradigm, GVSU has implement-
ed many other sustainable programs and practices
throughout its campuses. For example, students re-
cycle a variety of products, including plastics, paper,
metal, glass, motor oil, light bulbs, batteries, ink car-
tridges, computers, food waste, and more. Each winter
the school competes against other universities nation-
ally in RecycleMania, a national tournament to recycle
the most. Last year, Grand Valley took sixth place in the
nation in the composting category, and took first in the
state and 24th place in the nation as a Grand Cham-
pion. The category is based on the total percentage of
overall waste that is recycled during the competition.
“We’re very fortunate on this campus to have compost
in addition to recycling,” adds Jakobcic, “so we’re able
to divert quite a lot of our waste from the landfill. We
ranked second in the nation in the waste minimization
category for the “Game Day Challenge” of RecycleMa-
nia because we were able to divert about 80 percent
[of recyclable materials] at one of our football games.”
In fact, all campus-wide efforts to minimize waste have
helped reduce the amount of trash sent to the landfill
by about 10,000 pounds each week.
CLEAN & GREEN
