It’s a warm March day at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and sophomore Maya Cosentino is guiding the college’s rickety blue van down a winding road that follows the St. Mary’s River.
On this sunny afternoon, her destination is a compost heap.
She yanks open the side door of the van and hauls out white and blue plastic buckets full of cantaloupe skin, coffee grinds, pineapple cores and other things resulting from that day’s breakfast and lunch at the campus dining hall.
“I pick up about five of these gallon buckets every evening, it takes about a half hour,” says Cosentino, who then empties what almost everyone else would recognize as garbage into the compost heap where in a few months nature will turn it into fertilizer.
A few yards away in a grassy opening where the van is parked, senior Alice Vossbrinck rakes the student-made vegetable garden so she can grow her own vegetables in the spring. The compost from the pile Cosentino has just fed will be used to fertilize the garden.
“Kids grow whatever they want there, all sorts of greens,” said Benjamin Hancock, a sophomore who oversees the garden.
The scene at St. Mary’s College is being played out in various ways at colleges around the state. Students are composting their food scraps, sharing showers and working with professors on windmills; they’re switching to florescent light bulbs and even giving student funds to encourage renewable energy. Mostly the result of student initiatives, the projects are making even the most reluctant of administrators sit up and take notice.
At Washington College in Chestertown, the “George Goes Green,” campaign is in full swing again this year. The brainchild of senior Shannon Holste, the campaign organizes a competition between dorms on campus to see which uses the least energy. This year, the winning dorm will get breakfast in bed – served by the student environmental club – the weekend before finals.
“The idea with the prize is if they save the school energy, then we will save them physical energy by bringing them breakfast in bed,” said Holste.
Last year, Washington College students went to extremes to win the prize of a catered party. They piled into the shower together, turned off the lights for days on end, refused to do laundry and even shared computers.
“It got a little bit crazy last year,” Holste said. “Students were trying so hard, I would walk into the dorm and all the lights would be out. The bathroom was pitch-black. Kids were wandering around running into each other. They didn’t do their laundry for three weeks.”
Holste hopes to see the same kind of enthusiasm once this year’s campaign nears its end in April. Just a week ago, the environmental club drew a line around the science building on campus to demonstrate where water would be if the sea level were to rise three feet, a common prediction by scientists.
“Since we are on a hill, we would be kind of an island. The college would be shut down,” said Kascie Herron another environmentally minded student on campus.
These eco-friendly students are getting some serious support from faculty and administrators. Most colleges are encouraging the green movement and are willing to put the power of the purse and faculty expertise behind it.
At St. Mary’s College, the trustees voted to contribute an extra $130,000 to make the new Anne Arundel Hall certified by the Leadership in Ene