Green goes to school

Raghav's group took a standard Irvine dorm room -- a two-bed box built in 1965 -- and spent 100 hours setting it up with hemp towels, organic cotton sheets, a reusable elephant grass shopping basket and bed frames made of recycled train tracks. Each item is tagged with a price and where to buy it, and no source is farther than a 10-minute bike ride.

Such student campaigns are signs of larger changes ahead. Some schools have already built apartments with low-flow shower heads, low-VOC paints, carpeting made from reused materials, even solar-heated pools. Others lag behind. It's one thing to install motion sensors that automatically turn off lights in a 40-year-old building; it's another thing to construct a new hall with high-efficiency heating and cooling units that shut off when windows open.

"Students challenged us to think more green," says UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry T. Yang, who hosted a statewide sustainability conference in June. UCSB, like Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and some other California campuses, is building residence halls designed to maximize natural ventilation rather than rely on air conditioning. Dual-flush toilets and other green features are expected to help the projects earn the coveted Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

Next week, students at Pitzer College in Claremont will start moving into new dorms with garden rooftops and photovoltaic panels. New LEED-certified housing will soon replace all the old dorms on campus, officials say, and rooms will be cleaned only with green products.

But at what inconvenience to students? None, says Joel Neel, facilities associate director for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which is completing a 2,670-bed LEED-certified apartment complex. "It will be absolutely invisible to students that they are living in a green building unless they want to learn about it," Neel says, adding that construction waste was recycled and 450 trees were planted on acres that were devoted to agricultural storage sheds, a blacksmith workshop and cattle feed lots.

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ON a visit to Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz student Lauren Mills notices her sister campus' drought-tolerant native grasses, water-filtering bio swales surrounding student housing and the freeway of bike paths. Then she sees the new green buildings and shakes her head.