Campus Greening: Warren Wilson College, Asheville, North Carolina

The WWC Garden uses hoop houses to extend the growing season and offer the College's dining services greater access to local, sustainably grown produce.

Warren Wilson College’s commitment to sustainability is anchored to the school’s mission: “to provide an education combining liberal arts study, work, and service with a strong commitment to environmental responsibility and experiential opportunities for international and cross-cultural understanding in a setting that promotes wisdom, spiritual growth, and contribution to the common good.”

In 1997, the entire campus community approved an Environmental Commitment Statement that guides most of the practices on campus today. The statement notes that one of the major draws to Warren Wilson (WWC) is “the perception that we are an active, participatory community that shares a deep commitment and a passionate concern for the health of our planet.”

The statement continues with the following commitments:

• We are interested in conserving resources, reducing waste, and eliminating pollution, but our feelings extend deeper to a recognition that we are also component parts of an interdependent web of social and ecological relationships. The recognition of our membership in this ecological community leads us to reconsider our ideals, values, and organizing principles.
• Ours is a working landscape, rooted in a particular bioregion, and part of an interconnected, but limited, global commons. We recognize the need to exercise wise use of the resources of the global commons, and, at the same time, the need for a deep, aesthetic, spiritually-based involvement with the community that extends beyond the human inhabitants of Warren Wilson College.

WWC brings these commitments to life through campus operations. The College was recognized with the 2006 Campus Sustainability Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education for notable strides in the past two years. In particular, the college has made advancements in the areas of clean energy and transportation, green building, and sustainable agriculture.

WWC’s newly appointed president, Dr. Sandy Pfeiffer, is a founding signatory of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which commits the college to significantly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. WWC conducts an annual Greenhouse Gas Inventory (initiated in 2004–05) to track yearly energy usage and emissions and to identify related trends. The college’s solar array is being expanded to annually deliver 19.9 megawatt-hours of solar power to the region through the North Carolina Green Power program—making it the largest single array in the western part of the state. As a result of a student initiative, WWC also now purchases 4.4 million kilowatt-hours of wind energy to offset 100 percent of the on-campus electricity usage.

In the transportation area, all campus diesel engines now run on 100 percent biodiesel fuel (B100) in the summer months and 50 percent biodiesel (B50) in the winter. All campus lawnmowers were converted to propane, for which the college received the 2006 Propane Exceptional Energy Fleet Award from the Propane Education & Research Council.

WWC has also made strides in green building. Orr Cottage is the first higher education building in the southeast to receive LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) “Gold” certification status and was granted the Green Building Project of the Year Award at the 16th annual Carolina Recycling Association Conference in Raleigh. Two new dorms have been built to LEED Gold standards (certification in progress), and the College’s EcoDorm is set to receive LEED “Existing Building” Platinum certification.

In other green activities, the purchase of a GREENDRUM in-vessel compost system enables WWC’s Recycling and Solid Waste department to compost more than 50 tons of food scrap per year. The WWC Garden produces 2,000 pounds of main crops and 500 pounds of lesser crops for consumption in the college cafeteria. In addition, all campus cleaning products are Green Seal certified.

For more on WWC’s environmental commitments, visit www.warren-wilson.edu/environmental/sustainability/main.

Submitted by Stan Cross, Education Director, Environmental Leadership Center, Warren Wilson College.