Campus Greening: Harford Community College, Bel Air, Maryland

Harford Community College has made leaps and bounds in the sustainability area over the past decade, though it got its start even before then. HCC’s campus greening movement began in 1993, when the school founded its sustainability department and installed an “Energy Management System” to maximize energy efficiency in each new building. The school’s next step was to implement the use of waterless urinals campus-wide, resulting in a significant decrease in water use and waste.

Since then, HCC has upgraded nearly all areas of its campus with motion sensing lights to save electricity. For equipment that can’t be fitted with these sensors, such as vending machines and the swimming pool, the school has established general hours of operation and turns off the lights and heating and cooling equipment when the facilities aren’t in use. Finally, and perhaps most innovatively, HCC captures rain water, which otherwise would have washed down campus drains, for most of its landscape watering.

The school’s efforts resulted in “Campus Ecology Recognition” from the National Wildlife Federation in 2002–03. After receiving the award, HCC held a brilliant Earth Day ceremony, during which students and faculty planted 54 trees, a butterfly garden was built to promote biodiversity, and the Stormwater Gardens were planted to improve the quality of the runoff water from storms.

—Mark Friese