Page 38 - Priorities #50 2011-June/July

38
The Green Page
A letter from the Priory Sustainability Coordinator
Dear Priory Community
This year marked a real turning point in the school’s attitudes toward sustainable operations. We’ve set goals and benchmarks, and implemented procedures for attaining those goals. Next year will see continued progress in the areas of material and energy efficiency. I also hope that next year will see improvements in the school’s efforts to integrate sustainable thinking into curriculum and community relations.
My goals for sustainable improvements in Priory operations have included a short-term 33% improvement in diversion-from-landfill -- which we realized, and a longer-term goal of energy consumption equaling the school’s solar production.
These goals, of course, make economic sense for the school. Our reduction in landfill waste and associated hauling fees could save as much as $8000 in the first year after implementation. These savings have come about at no cost to the school. Additionally, the PG&E subsidized lighting retrofit that the school undertook will save the school almost 40% in lighting costs. We will realize further savings pending the determination of our EPA Energy Star benchmark score, and analysis and implementation of future opportunities for energy efficiency.
I also hope, beyond the economic and environmental impacts of our efficiency strategies, ripple effects will reach our local and regional community. In keeping with the belief that schools serve as effective models of affective education, it is my hope that our efforts at material and energy efficiency percolate into the minds and habits of our students, the households of Priory communities, and the larger global community. By role-modeling sustainable thinking, we challenge students to practice the same habits at home, to be critical thinkers about the practices and policies at work in their communities, and to affect change in the attitudes of society at large.
And while this kind of thinking could be faulted on account of its heavy reliance on idealism, consider this aspect of the energy economy in which we live: electricity markets are not economies of scale. That is, while in some economic markets, increases in demand can eventually reduce costs for the production of additional supplies as new means of production become more efficient, with municipal electricity production, this will never be the case. Hence, the more electricity that a population consumes, the higher the cost of meeting new peaks in demand. Conversely, reductions in energy consumption result in reduction of prices. Thus, it makes sense for everyone – power users and producers alike – to seek out and implement more energy efficiency programs.
We also hope that this kind of affective education influences the local and regional community. Certainly, educational endeavors such as our emphasis on compassionate thinking, social justice,
and service learning have unforeseen ripple-effects on a community that extends beyond the campus boundaries and the walls of Priory family households. The school’s involvement with the Daraja Academy in Kenya, student-led efforts to raise funds for emergency relief in Japan, and the needs assessments of many of this year’s Senior Projects are all evidence of the fact that, ‘what happens at the Priory doesn’t stay at the Priory’.