Freezers, Interviews, and Vegan Donuts: Growing Green Certification Programs
The project summary is intended to present a concise description of the project in a form useful to a variety of readers who may not be familiar with the topic. For my capstone internship, I worked with ESS to overcome recruitment barriers as identified by a previous capstone student. I also conducted interviews with lab employees to find out about barriers they perceive and their suggestions for overcoming them.
The Office of Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability manages green certification programs that promote and recognize sustainable behavior. These include the Green Greek, Green Office, Green Dorm, and Green Laboratory certification programs. Out of the four, the Green Laboratory program is significant because labs are energy intensive; they use four times the energy of offices of the same size. Therefore, campus-wide adoption of sustainable lab practices will move the university toward climate-neutrality. Because of the large number of labs that have not chosen to attain green certification, additional research on incentives and barriers is required.
