22 Business View - October 2015
CLEAN & GREEN
sociate Vice President both invited students, faculty, and
other staff to join the Sustainability Committee, and to
participate in planning and implementing campus green-
ing projects.”
Robert Sheeley is Southern’s Associate Vice President for
Facilities Operations and Capital Budgeting. He has co-
chaired the university’s Sustainability Committee since
it was formed in 2007. Of the climate commitment, he
says: “We signed on to the Presidents Climate Commit-
ment in 2007 without a clear vision of what a thriving net
carbon neutral campus could look like. The pledge truly
was a leap of faith from the facilities perspective, and is
still a developing field. Back in 2007, renewable energy
was prohibitively expensive, energy efficiency technology
was much more limited, and there were nowhere near as
many products we could recycle in a logistically feasible
or financially responsible way. That has been changing
quickly. I used to worry that I’d run out of ‘low hanging
fruit’ to balance some of the cost of bigger projects, but
the rate and variety of innovation - both in technology and
financing - is tellingme we’ll have choices for a long time.”
Huminski elaborates further upon Southern’s matura-
tion process regarding the relatively “new” arena of cam-
pus sustainability programs: “Sustainability has gone
through a really interesting mainstreaming process,” she
explains. “It has evolved as a field. Whereas it may origi-
nally have been a revolutionary concept where students
were creating demands for change, now sustainability
has turned into a set of leadership and process challeng-
es, where we can take well-established management
strategies and create sustainable outcomes. Overall, in-
novation is an incremental process.”
Regardless of how the initial impetus arose, or how it de-
