Sustainability at Longwood became very popular around my freshman year, with the freshman required to read “Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth” by Jim Merkel for LSEM. I read the entire book, met Mr. Merkel during New Lancer Days, and had a chance to pick his brain. The subject of the book is quite clear: begin living a simple life in order to leave the Earth better than it was when you were born.
The book was not exactly a hit with most of the students. I remember the animosity that Mr. Merkel faced when he spoke to the incoming freshman class. Students were in his face about how much they disagreed with his ideas, but Longwood had made a pledge to become more sustainable.
One of the biggest sustainable places on campus is the heating plant. The heating plant’s main fuel source is sawdust, which is a renewable resource — at least as long as there are trees on the planet. As I walk past the heating plant on my way to and from campus, I often notice the color of the smoke coming out and I’m a little concerned about it. Just last week, the smoke was black. It was thick and hung in the air for hours at dusk and into the night. The smoke made its way to Brock Commons because of the wind and even down into the Longwood Landings. I cannot help but notice how harmful black smoke
probably is to humans, let alone the environment. Maybe something was in the sawdust that made the smoke black when it was burned, but needless to say, it was disconcerting. I don’t feel comfortable breathing in black smoke, or even thick white smoke.
The school is saving a lot of money by burning sawdust for heating and hot water, but is it enough?
Another big thing Longwood has began doing in the past few years is recycling. Well, Longwood purchased the blue recycling trashcans and put them around campus in hopes that students will begin recycling rather than just throwing everything away, but I have witnessed, on multiple occasions, the trash from the recycling trashcans going into the exact same bin as the regular trash. Now, I can almost guarantee that Longwood has not hired a person, or group of people, to be responsible for sifting through the trash at the end of the day and putting the paper in one pile, cardboard in another, plastic in another, aluminum in another and the rest in another. Yeah, Longwood looks sustainable and environmentally friendly from the outside, but how sustainable are we really?
Every day I walk around campus and see students throw trash all over the place because they don’t care, but if the school doesn’t give us something to care about, how will we ever care about recycling or sustainability? I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t recycle like I should, but most of us don’t.
On the sustainability portion of Longwood’s website, it clearly states: “Here at Longwood University, we pride ourselves on being a green community that strives to reduce the carbon footprint we leave on Earth.” I have one question: are we really sustainable?
I recently noticed that more and more televisions are being placed around campus and are running nonstop. Why are these televisions on a 24 hour feed when nobody is in the academic buildings after ten or so at night?
The lights in most of the buildings stay on 24 hours a day, too. Classroom lights usually get turned off, and so do the lights in professors’ offices, but the hallway lights are constantly running. It’s not even the safety lights that stay on, it’s the main lights that suck energy and run up the campus’s electricity bill. Computers stay plugged in year- round, which isn’t good for energy conservation, either. When will any of this change?
Longwood University is home to one of the most beautiful campuses in Virginia, at least in my opinion, but when will students, faculty and staff care more about our energy conservation, recycling and sustainability? We have a recycling center on campus, but it seems to be rarely utilized, let alone known about. I asked a student last week if they’ve ever visited the center, and they didn’t even know Longwood was supposedly sustainable or that we had a recycling center. He asked me why we had a recycling center if the school doesn’t really recycle, and I couldn’t answer him. I should also note that we were having this conversation as we watched a worker mix the regular trash with the recycling trash in a large garbage can before driving away on his golf cart.
It’s up to all of us on campus to be more sustainable if we are truly going to make that pledge to the rest of the world. The last thing I want is for someone to think that Longwood is exaggerating on its pledge to become more sustainable.
If you would like to read more about the sustainability efforts on campus, please see www.longwood.edu/ sustainability/.
