Byrd Stadium
While the Terrapins football team worked to ignite its first Big Ten conference rivalry against Penn State this weekend, junior Ori Gutin was connecting with students from fellow universities to form the first Big Ten sustainability committee.
Following this university’s admission to the athletic conference in July, Gutin, director of the Student Government Association’s sustainability committee, began contacting 160 different sustainability organizations at all 14 Big Ten schools.
“After a week, we had 40 responses and we have gotten more than 60 responses since then,” said Gutin, an environmental science and policy major.
Although the Big Ten conference already has a student government assembly — the Association of Big Ten Students — no forum exists for students to discuss sustainability issues, Gutin said.
The committee would also be a nonaffiliated subset of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, which publishes innovative sustainability practices yearly, among other initiatives.
“I was really excited when I found out about this; I was just surprised no one had thought of it,” said Christina Cilento, a sophomore journalism major at Northwestern University.
Of the 14 Big Ten schools, 11 have already chosen representatives to participate in the organization.
As a nod to the Big Ten’s traditionally powerful sports programs, early sustainability committee members are first focusing on sustainable initiatives at each school’s athletic department.
The No. 1 greenhouse gas producer in athletic departments is the airplane emissions from student athletes and professors flying to games and conferences, Cilento said.
Instead of just planting trees and using even more renewable energy sources to offset carbon emissions, several Big Ten university sustainability committees are proposing resolutions that include a carbon emission tax. This tax, which Cilento is hoping to implement at Northwestern University, would apply to both athletic departments and students to discourage overtraveling and help pay for the carbon-offset projects.
Another sustainability goal that all 11 members of the committee would like to push is zero waste production from their athletic stadiums.
To reach zero waste at a stadium, it must divert at least 90 percent of waste from landfills, Cilento said.
At this university, the athletic department, Facilities Management and Dining Services are cooperating to produce zero waste at all athletic facilities on the campus, starting with Byrd Stadium. Improvements to the stadium’s sustainability include adding more recycling bins, eliminating condiment packets and replacing them with condiment stations, and adding compost collection bins.
The Sustainability Fund-backed project has set a goal to reach zero waste within the next three years.
“We have zero waste at our stadium through just recycling, but it’s not anything perfect,” said Kyla Kaplan, a sophomore environmental studies major at the University of Wisconsin.
The Northwestern University sustainability committee wants to make their stadium zero-waste too, Cilento said, through teaching fans what to recycle and providing recycling bins to direct the flow of waste.
“We are always looking at peer institutions and Big Ten schools to see what they’re working on in sustainability,” she said.
Gutin hopes to have the committee’s organizational structure and mission statement ready in February so the spring semester can be used to address conferencewide issues.
“I think we should definitely focus on establishing legitimacy because what we say and do doesn’t matter until then,” said Samuel Reed, a sophomore environmental science major at Ohio State University.
The committee hopes to meet for the first time via conference call within the next few weeks and find a representative from every school in the Big Ten, Gutin said.
“It’s a really great idea because it brings all these people together with common goals and common thoughts.” Kaplan said. “There’s definitely power in numbers.”
