Middlebury Field Trip

This past weekend two vans of administrators took a trip north to tour the environmental programs of Middlebury College. The trip was initiated by Dave Dethier in Geosciences. His comments on the trip are as follows:

They saw what I wanted Middlebury to show us and heard that it was ok to experiment, calculate building paybacks for long-term, use LEED even if they didn't believe in the "medallion" cuz it was an easy target for fundraising, think about the total built area of the campus, etc...and on a budget far less than ours. We saw architecturally beautiful, high-tech buildings of all sorts and scales and heard that each one built on the learning that came with the previous building, etc. We talked at length to the wood-chip plant VP--it is still a work in progress--and were amazed at their recycling system (loses $) and composting (gains the bucks back). Most of all, I was again impressed with the top-down commitment to sustainability and to helping the local economy.

A quick talk with Bob Volpi, director of Dining Services, today also confirmed that the composting there is very impressive and they are interested here in learning from it.

Another report through the grapevine from Stephen Klass, VP of operations at Williams, was a general observation that Middlebury isn't nearly as far 'ahead' of us as we had been thinking and possibly a year of concentrated effort could bring the Williams campus up to the level of environmental action as them. As an addendum to that, Williams should be much more vocal about the things that we do do and get more credit instead of being so subtle.