Jessica Pacetti
Staff Writer
North Central College is the first four-year liberal college in the suburban area of Chicago to receive the Illinois Campus Sustainability Compact gold level status.
The Illinois Camus Sustainability Compact outlines environmental goals that Illinois colleges or universities, whether they are private or public institutions, may adapt to become a greener campus.
There are three levels to the compact and each level has different goals that a school may create in order to complete each level. There are three levels to the compact, bronze (being the lowest), silver and gold.
Each college or university can sign up to partake in the Illinois Campus Sustainability Compact and decide which level they wish to accomplish. North Central shot for the gold level (the highest level on the compact).
In 2012, the College completed the bronze level status, and this year accomplished the gold level making North Central one of 14 colleges in Illinois that has received this status.
“It’s pretty exciting,” said Sustainability Coordinator Brittany Graham on receiving the gold level for the compact.
The sustainability committees back in 2011 signed onto the sustainability compact to incorporate more sustainability into the campus community.
Some of the changes brought about by this compact were the creation of the sustainability website for the College as well as creating Graham’s position.
“The great thing about this compact was we set the sustainability goals for the campus,” said Graham.
One of the goals that were set for the compact was a landfill diversion rate. Basically how much waste that is thrown away can avoid the landfills and instead be composted or recycled.
In 2009, only 9% of the campus’s waste avoided the landfills. Since the signing of the compact the amount of waste avoiding the landfills has increased to 29% in 2014. The goal now is 50% of the campus’s waste will be diverted from the landfills.
“There are some projects that are easy but this one [gold level projects]stretched us a bit and really showed that the college really cares about sustainability,” said Graham.
One of the larger goals that Graham and the Business Office took on for the compact was monitoring all of the energy sources on campus. Basically they monitored how much water, waste, energy, etc. the buildings on campus were using.
Graham sorted through every bill for every month of all 40-campus buildings since 2009 till now to see the progress of change and improvement of the decrease of waste in the buildings.
Even after achieving the gold level status, Graham is still working on completing more green goals for the campus that she hopes to accomplish by 2020. Some of them include eliminating the use of Styrofoam on campus, reduce paper use on campus by 30%, and save 1,000,000 KWH annually by implementing energy efficiency measures.
