by Jerreck McWilliams
Staff writer
Staff photo by Jerreck McWilliams
This 50 gallon barrel behind the SE printshop collects rainwater to be used to water plants inside the printshop.
Senate Bill 1069, signed by Gov. Mary Fallin on May 30, seeks to reduce 20 percent of the energy consumption of all state buildings by 2020, according to the Director of the Southeastern Physical Plant Eddie Harbin.
Southeastern, being a state institution, falls under this category.
Harbin, who is also part of the Campus Sustainability Committee that addresses green issues at the university, explained that SE has already been taking steps to reduce energy usage and costs since the beginning of fall 2011.
“The two things our Campus Sustainability Committee chose to focus on at the beginning of the year was recycling and replacing our lights with LED lights,” Harbin said. “We’ve been replacing them when and where we can, focusing on high-traffic and high-maintenance areas like Morrison.”
Harbin said that many lights across campus have been replaced with LED lights, but that the Bloomer Sullivan Arena was one of the areas that required special equipment to replace.
They have to use a lift to reach the ceiling where the lights are, and they will be replacing eight lights there this summer, said Harbin.
As for recycling, Harbin said, “We have a recycling area put together at grounds now. We gave them a shed where people can take their paper and plastic.”
Harbin said that the recycling effort is a partnership with the Choctaw Recycling Center, where the recyclable material collected at the campus grounds keeping compound is taken.
Heating and cooling is another big energy consumer that Harbin said the university has been trying to tame. Harbin said that most of the university is on its energy-saving system contracted by Siemens.
“We make ice at night that we use in the cooling system during the peak hours of the day from 2 to 4, and it saves a lot of energy on cooling,” Harbin said.
Harbin said the energy restriction requirements of Senate Bill 1096 should not be hard to meet.
“The bill is based on a program OSU setup in 2007. It’s already saved them something like $600,000 or $800,000,” Harbin said.
However, the cost of updating current equipment to energy efficient equipment can be an issue, according to Harbin.
“Energy efficient equipment like LED lights, high efficiency motors and such cost more up-front,” Harbin said.
“When we replace equipment, we try to look at it and see how much it would cost to get the energy efficient stuff versus the cheaper equipment. Generally we get the more efficient equipment because it saves money in the long run.”
Although it is not part of the bill’s purview, in addition to energy conservation, the university has also concentrated on reducing its water consumption, according to Gingerlei Waddell, one of SE’s campus gardeners.
“Most of the sprinklers on campus are on automatic timers,” Waddell said. Waddell and Harbin both confirmed that the front lawn of the university was the exception to this, however. It is on manually operated sprinklers which run during the day in order to keep it green.
Both also mentioned various efforts by the university to reduce indoor water consumption.
Waddell said that Coca Cola and the Choctaw Recycling Center donated a 50 gallon rainwater collection barrel to the Bryan County Master Gardeners, which then donated it to Southeastern to be used at the university’s print shop.
Pam Forster, print shop coordinator, said that the print shop plans to use the water from the barrel to water their plants. “Now that it finally rained, I’m going to start using it,” said Forster. “We got about half a barrel full.”
According to Harbin, the university has also taken steps to reduce water waste from sinks and toilets, not just through watering plants.
“We’ve installed flow regulators on a lot of our sinks that brought them down from 3 liters per minute to 1.3,” Harbin said. “We’ve also converted all of our toilets to the low volume-per-flush ones.”
One thing the university’s Campus Sustainability Committee had considered, according to Harbin, is to build an underground reservoir to collect runoff from the campus parking lots.
“We were looking at putting one underneath the parking lot next to Shearer, but the cost was so high that it just wasn’t doable,” Harbin said.
Senate Bill 1069 goes into effect Aug. 1 and, despite the costs of updating current facilities, should save the state “between 300 million and 500 million dollars” over the next 10 years according to Fallin’s signing address.