Steve, welcome to the campus energy and sustainability podcast. In each episode, we talk with leading campus professionals, thought leaders, engineers and innovators addressing the unique challenges and opportunities facing higher ed and corporate campuses. Our discussions will range from energy conservation and efficiency to planning and finance, from building science to social science, from energy systems to food systems. We hope you're ready to learn, share and ultimately accelerate your institution towards solutions. I'm your host, Dave carlscod. I'm a Director of Energy and Sustainability at Brailsford and Dunleavy.
I see our role as Andy and his team and others are setting the vision. They're setting the goals, they're setting the standards, and then we as an athletic department are contributing towards those higher level campus goals and standards, and they're providing us some tools and guidance to get there. I'm
sure. If you ask athletics Michigan medicine or student life, what their number one mission critical priorities are, sustainability might not be at the very top, and so it's our job to work closely with those units, to come up with a plan and a program that's successful for all of us.
We're trying to manage what we can and get that story out there and show folks that, hey, we actually we do care about the environment. On 110,000 people here on Saturday, and we're really only sending, you know, less than two tons of waste to a landfill. Everything else is getting composted or recycled. In
this episode, we tackle sustainability through the lens of collegiate athletics at the University of Michigan. My guests are Andy Berkey, Director of the Office of campus sustainability, and Paul Dunlop, Associate Director of Facilities operations for Michigan athletics. We discuss both the logistics and the community impacts of Michigan's impressive Zero Waste game days, you'll hear about campus energy efficiency efforts, improving the fan experience, and you'll hear us explore the special role of athletics in US higher education, including its cultural power and very real sustainability challenges, Whether you're focused on campus operations, athletics or institutional strategy. This episode offers real world insights for creating a culture of sustainability that sticks. I hope you enjoy this episode, recorded in May 2025,
Paul and Andy, it's great to have you on the show today. It's great to be here. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for having us. I think we'll start with just some basic introductions, maybe Paul, I'll start with you. Can you just give us a little bit about who you are and a little bit about how you got into this work at the nexus of sustainability and athletics?
Yeah, for sure. My name is Paul Dunlop. I'm the Associate Athletic Director for facility operations and capital projects, and within that, I'm the the lead for sustainability on the athletic department. So we have 27 buildings, little over 2 million square feet of space in athletics, and my team manages the day to day usage, the setups, the preparations for events, hosting those events, cleaning up from those events. And then, from a sustainability perspective, I'm tied in with our preventative maintenance programs, our Corrective maintenance, energy conservation efforts, our waste diversion efforts and and then I also work on capital projects, and we're doing either smaller or larger renovations, working with design teams to make buildings, construct buildings that allow our teams to be successful and win on the field, and try to make those buildings sustainable, right? I'm always thinking a little bit further down the line, we design buildings around a table, but the guy six months or a year later that's operating that building, and is it operating the way it was? It was designed to operate great Andy. I'm Andy
Burkey. I'm the Executive Director for the Office of campus sustainability at the university, and then align centrally within our business and finance office, reporting up through our chief financial officer. I've been working in the sustainability space on campus for over 30 years, and my office is primarily responsible for developing programs to drive progress on institutional wide sustainability and carbon neutrality goals, and have a large engineering team focused on reducing energy consumption in existing buildings. We also manage all of the recycling operations on campus, composting operations on campus, and we have about 20 full time staff within my department.
Yeah, I know the University of Michigan to be one of the highly referenced programs within my work in sustainability around higher ed, but it's great to talk to you guys, both today and really narrowing in on this topic around sustainability in athletics and stadiums in particular. I'll admit it's not a topic. I personally have spent a lot of time, and most of my work's been more on district energy or energy efficiency in buildings and things. So there's some overlaps. It sounds like Paul with what you're doing, but it's I've always been impressed with the least high level goals and metrics that I've heard coming out of the. University of Michigan, I know you have a pretty substantial waste diversion goal. I know you have, you made some pretty good progress, and the fact that you even have composting on campus is, you know, is impressive to a lot of campuses. Maybe. Andy, I'll start with you, you know, maybe talk a little bit about the operational strategies that you've found to be most useful, like what's worked so far with what you've been doing. And maybe you can correct any of my metrics if I didn't get those
right. Yeah. So we have an institutional waste reduction goal to reduce waste being sent to landfills by 40% from our baseline, and that includes all facilities on our 40 million square feet of infrastructure on the Ann Arbor campus. So that covers everything, and I think some of the programs that we found to be most effective, including a very robust composting program. So in addition to what we have going on at the stadium and athletics, as far as zero waste, we have a robust program that covers all of our buildings on campus, where we compost food waste and other compostables coming out of our buildings. We also have a very effective recycling program on campus, and actually, just this week as one example, we capture everything coming out about our residence halls. When our students are leaving campus, roughly 10 to 12 tons of material is captured a year and diverted from landfill and recycled and back to the community, actually. So those are all programs that are really effective for us. That's
great. As a parent of who just drove his kids stuff home from college last weekend, I could relate to that one. So Paul, I'd be interested to hear a little bit more about game day. That sounds like you know, I know I've been to plenty of sporting events, and people don't tend to clean up after themselves very well in that state of mind, either they're celebrating or or maybe not celebrating, but talk a little bit about that process that seems overwhelming.
Sure. Well, there's, there's no bins in the seating ball for you throw your waste away. We have 107,000 seats, so we, we don't have enough room left over to put bins out there in the seating ball. So, yeah, I would say half of the waste that's collected from a football game day is what's picked up on a Sunday morning after the game and but the other half is what people dispose of. Our fans dispose of themselves. The Michigan Stadium Zero Waste program started in 2017 partnership with Andy and his team, took a lot of time and effort to really come up with with how we were going to do this. It had been put forward by students for a couple of years before that, and we love the fact that our star students are passionate about sustainability and and they nudged us for a couple of years to say we really ought to do this. And other big stadiums were doing it. So we got on board 2017 and we've been doing it pretty successfully since then. It's been a journey. I think. We started off and got some things right and got some things wrong, and we've learned over the years how to do it best. We're not the only big stadium doing it right, so I've, I've interacted with other stadium operators and folks in the industry to learn best practices, but I think we're doing it. We're doing a decent job. We we don't generate as much waste as one might think. If you consider the size of the Ann Arbor campus, and even though we have 110,000 people there on a football Saturday, the amount of waste that's being generated is a very small percentage of the overall campus waste. But it's super, super visible. It's really important, right? It's probably the best way for us to demonstrate, as an institution that we're committed to waste diversion, because it takes a lot of effort. It costs more, but it's important, and that's why we do it.
Well, two follow ups there, I guess one would be, it'd be interesting just to hear logistically, how you do it, but maybe kind of keying off your last question. So it is relatively small in the grand scheme of the entire university, but have you seen some spillover effects from using that visible time in the rest of campus? I'll
let I'll let Andy answer that one. Yeah. I mean, I think so. It's hard to quantify, right, what the impact of the program at the stadium is on the rest of campus. But just to punctuate what Paul said, I mean, we we really value that program more from a cultural impact standpoint and in the message it sends. And you know, when you have 110,000 people in the stadium, significant percentage of those people are coming from the community, right? They're not University of Michigan staff, faculty or students. They're also community members. And what we you know, in addition to the actual operational piece of the stadium, zero waste program, athletics, does a fantastic job of publicizing what we're doing and why we're doing it on the big screens at the stadium during intermissions and at halftime. And it's that kind of impact that we can make on the community, and what they take away from that and hopefully carry forth that their own homes is where we feel the greatest impact is, no, that's
great. I often will say, you know, there's, there's certain programs at universities which are, you know, to get the gold star for the university, or the college itself. You know, like we're doing the right thing as it is. Institution. But there are some other things to solve global problems we need to, like, ramp up and and send out. And that sounds like a great way to really affect your entire region, as opposed to just the staff. That's great. But Paul, maybe, can you talk us through? I just really curious. Like, how do you actually pull that off? That sounds like that's a lot of stuff. Like, what happens to it? Can you just give us the blow by blow?
Sure. Well, in theory, we control the waste stream, which makes it easier. So it's a closed loop waste stream that anything that's put out there for on a football game day. So thinking about within the France perimeter on a football game day, the waste being generated is either from food and beverage sales, merchandise sales, or it's back a house. So some people sneak things in. We know that happens, but that's a pretty small percentage of the overall waste, and it's probably
those Michigan State fans, right? Yeah,
probably we won't get into that, but the key right from the get go for us was, was alignment with the vendors and concessionaires. So if we're selling hot dogs, sodas, hamburgers, the packaging that all of those food items come in needs to be accepted at your local recycling or compost facilities. And we found that manufacturers will advertise products as recyclable, but our local MRF didn't necessarily accept them. So there was a couple of years of working through the packaging materials to ensure everything was compliant and that the quality of product was acceptable. You know, the hot dogs was was something at the start. It was really a problem. Finding a product that would keep the hot dogs moist and warm was difficult. Took a couple of years to find something that finally got worked out. And so what? Once you control the waste stream, we only put out two bins. We have a compost bin and a recycling bin. We do not have a fan facing landfill bin. We only have landfill collection in the back of house areas and behind the concession stands. So we found one of the common sources of contamination was our nonprofit organizations who come in and operate the concession stands for us on a game day, there's over 1000 people doing that, and gloves, food service, wipes, etc, were ending up in one of the two fan facing bins. So one of the changes we made was putting a landfill bin behind the counter to try to keep that common contamination out. We also jokingly refer to the dumpster police, where we found that the effort was being made on the front end for folks to separate and bag the waste, and then they would get brought over to the waste collection areas. There's four big areas around the concourse, and whether it was our janitorial services, the NPL groups facility staff, they might throw a blue bag full of recycling materials into the landfill bin, just you know, and for whatever reason, perhaps the recycling bin was too full. So we now have dedicated folks who monitor, they police the dumpsters to make sure that the bags are thrown in the correct dumpsters low hanging fruit, but proved to be really successful.
Oh, that's great, yeah. I mean, that's it's amazing to think about all of those steps. And I one of the things that I always struggle with on, you know, doing this work, people are like, Oh, you work in sustainability. Oh, solar panels and recycling. Those are the only two things that you have to think about, right? And you just described, you know, everything from the actual operations of the game day, the actual how you buy the products. I mean, there's so many steps there, and a lot of those aren't necessarily the decisions of an individual fan. It sounds like you've made the decisions for the individual fan. Just really, really simple, you know, which is great. We've
certainly tried to and one thing I think is aided in that process is taking the University of Michigan's signage. So if you walk into any building on the University of Michigan campus, you're going to see a standardized sign above the recycle bin, the compost bin, of the landfill bin. We took that template and then customized it for the stadium waste stream, so the materials that you might find in the library are different than what you're going to find in Michigan Stadium. But we kept that same template, that same look and design with icons, again, trying to make it super simple for the fans. When they just glance at it, they know which bin they're supposed to dispose of that material in Yeah, that's
great. Well, Andy, you mentioned some of the commercials in the middle of around the big screen, or how did that come to be? Because that seems like a lot of work as well. I know doing anything on a big screen at a stadium takes some planning. I mean,
that's that's really to athletics benefit, to be honest with you. They were the ones that were the impetus behind making sure that happened from a messaging standpoint. So I'd, you know, give them, give them all the credit, and emphasizing the importance of that program and taking up some premium sort of screen time, I guess I would say, to publicize what we're doing. From a sustainability standpoint,
that's great. Well, one one more topic on the waste stream and. Recycling, composting, like, do you have metrics that you've been tracking, and how have those maybe changed over time? I imagine that's probably gotten more sophisticated as you've gotten more sophisticated.
Yeah, we do. We quantify everything that we have leaving campus, and we measure it in tons. So it's tons of material that we capture. We measure that on an annual basis, reported out. We have very good platforms on our websites. So for those ever interested in seeing how we do it, we can get a hold of our University of Michigan Office of Camp sustainability, or go to the planet loop website, just pull up our waste metrics. They are they are quantified and reported out. We track that really closely, great. And
I guess one other related question would be, you know, it sounds like this morphed over the course of maybe a decade or so, is that? Is that fair? And if so, you know, that sounds like there were a lot of individual decisions that had to get sort of institutionalized, and typically that means funding decisions associated with those Can you speak a little bit about that journey, like, how did you get from where you were to where you are? And get people to agree to not only do it, but the people that had to pay for it, to pay for it.
Yeah, it's really been a journey over the course of time, as I've seen the sustainability program grow. Paul mentioned earlier about students, sort of nudging athletics. And I would say students have been really important stakeholders in our in this journey, and have nudge central administration along the way to establish both institutional goals and really formalize our program. And with that, has calm centralized funding that has enabled us to implement many of these programs across campus, including composting. So I have a good annual budget that's dedicated specifically toward our composting program and and as our campus continues to grow over time and infrastructure in need, you know, I just evaluate the budget, evaluate the need, and it's been supported from our highest levels of administration, which is very important for and related to our Success.
So is that to say? Then that because the students demanded it, it happened, not because there was some payback or some sort of, like, cost savings associated with it? Yeah,
the waste, the waste program, specifically, is no financial benefit to the University of Michigan. It's really been an environmental program, and it's not only students. I mean, we that work in this field, across campus, staff and faculty included, also want to do what we can to protect the environment, but students have been very helpful in moving this forward, maybe faster than it would have
interesting. Well, maybe that's a good transition that I know. Paul you also mentioned you run the buildings and the, you know, the infrastructure, the energy, it sounds like, I imagine that's a little less forward facing. I mean, obviously things should work, and lights should work, obviously for the caves, especially a night game. Can you speak a little bit more about that aspect of the program? Yeah,
absolutely, most of the times, folks don't realize that there's anything happening in a building until it doesn't work. They don't realize the amount of time and effort that goes into preventative maintenance in operations. But from from the athletics perspective, we really do try to minimize energy consumption, not only because it's contributing to the campus goals of carbon neutrality, but it makes good business sense. We're self funded here at the University of Michigan athletics, so we're looking for any way possible to reduce our utility costs. Do that in a number of ways. HVAC scheduling is very important. We don't just schedule buildings to turn on at six in the morning and turn off at 10 o'clock at night. There, every single building has a customized HVAC schedule based on its user needs and and sometimes we push back coaches might want to have a late night practice that that would require adjusting the HVAC schedule, and we tend to have conversations about, well, if we do that, it's going to activate the building longer, and do we really Need to so it's become a priority just on day to day operations. Another huge thing for us has been a partnership with Andy's team on building recommissioning. They have provided us with a service where engineers come in and really dig into all of our major building systems to identify inefficiencies, and not only are they finding inefficiencies, but they're finding some gaps in our preventative maintenance programs. And one recent example, we found an outdoor air damper that was commanded open three years ago in one of our smaller arenas. So we've been heating that building through three Michigan winters with 100% outdoor air. It's not, not ideal, but sometimes these things happen where technicians make adjustments in the field and they get forgotten about, and not all of our buildings have great controls. So this, this recommissioning program, has just been extremely valuable, and we're. Super appreciative of Andy and his team, and I think it's a great example of how the campus and the athletic department can work together towards common goals. Yeah,
is that? How are you guys structured? So does athletics pay its own utility bills? Is there bifurcation there, or is it kind of all centrally
funded? Yeah, we're paying for all of our utilities and for all of our maintenance and operational needs?
Great. So that's got a direct bet, like fixing the the open damper for three years was a financial boon, as opposed to the athletics team, right? For sure. Yeah, yeah, anything to add there? Andy, it's
just a great partnership. I mean, we we have, within my office, we have 13 full time engineers that focus on reducing energy consumption in existing buildings. And that's not only to save money, but it's it's to contribute to our carbon emission reduction goals, eliminating all scope one emissions by 2040 and all scope two emissions by the end of this year. And the program, Paul, speaking of recommissioning, is is one of those programs, is super successful. We like calling it our building Tune Up program for folks so they can understand it's kind of like, you know, you have a car and you bring it into the dealership or wherever, for a tune up, after as 100,000 miles, you find all this stuff, right? That's kind of gone wrong over time. Our buildings are no different, right? They've they've been built. They've gone through renovations and changes over the years. And maintenance folks have been in there, and they've technicians have been in there. But you know, when you stick a couple of engineers in there to kind of do a top to bottom evaluation of how the building is performing, and you find a lot of opportunities that can reduce energy consumption, save money at the same time, and reduce carbon emissions. So it's, it's a real positive program that we have. Yeah,
what more specifically, what are, I mean, I think Paul, you gave the example of the open damper, which is kind of a finding a problem and fixing it. But have there been other big programs? Imagine, over this, maybe your time, Andy, you've probably gone through some lighting upgrades, or sports, sports venues have different profiles than your Yeah. I
mean, I could go on and on on this one but one example is, you know, we have a formal program called a revolving Energy Fund, an ref, where we invest $5 million a year in our existing buildings and find specific projects to fund, and then this energy savings associated with those projects that we implement in the buildings, whether it's pump replacements, HVAC work, lighting, envelope work, the energy savings associated with those those projects is put back into the fund to fund more projects over time. So that's one example of our super successful program that we have on campus, in addition to the RE commissioning program. That's
great. That's campus wide, not just with athletics, I assume, yeah, it's campus wide. No, that's great. Do you do you stick $5 million every year into it, and then you still get to keep the savings as well. Or is that that seems that's great? If that's how it's set up,
yeah, that's how it's been working. And obviously, depending on the project that we're doing, you know, you have different payback periods, right? And so, you know, some of the projects have payback periods that are really short, like two to three year paybacks on lighting projects. And some of them have longer paybacks, seven or eight years. So depending on the size of the project and the length of the payback dictates how much money is going back into the fund.
That's great. Paul, any specific projects you would want to highlight specifically for athletics or athletic facilities. Yeah,
our sports lighting systems have been not necessarily the fastest payback so, you know, Andy was referencing, ideally, some of these projects are paying for themselves in a seven or eight year period. We've retrofitted the sports lighting systems at Michigan Stadium and Chrysler Center, our two biggest venues, with LED we went from 1000 watt metal halide lamps down to 600 watt LED lamps, so 40% reduction. But the runtime on those is pretty short on a daily basis, so the payback is much, much longer. But not only are we seeing an energy reduction, we're improving the fan experience. Now we can flash the lights, change the color, and it gives our marketing teams just some some options to improve the game day experience. So we love it when we can find projects that save money and improve either the game day atmosphere, user comfort or help our teams do whatever they need to do be successful. They're few and far between, but but LED lighting seems to be a common one. Well,
maybe that's a good transition too. I think one place I wanted to take this is you've alluded to a couple of programs that you're doing that aren't necessarily money savers, but are kind of the right thing to do, or being motivated by cultural reinforcing culture in the campus, or being driven by students. Athletics is an interesting part of a university culture in that it's the part that most average people still think about. Long after they've gotten their degree, they still go to the football game of their alma mater, or, you know, follow the back. Small tournament, et cetera. How is it different? Maybe, and maybe this might be, I'll throw this at you, Andy, since you kind of span both worlds, but maybe Paul, you've got some insights in here too. How is doing sustainability in athletics different than doing sustainability within the broader university context? Is there things that kind of pop to mind in there for
athletics? I think our challenge is the funding model, right? So athletics is self funded, and we're always trying to evaluate what sustainability efforts make the most sense, right? So we can't always fund or do everything that we want to do, particularly from a building design and construction perspective we're working on that we're definitely making progress. But you know, I see our role as Andy and his team and others are setting the vision, they're setting the goals, they're setting the standards, and then we as an athletic department are contributing towards those higher level campus goals and standards and and they're providing us some tools and guidance to get there, but the funding still can be challenging, even for a big place like us. Yeah, is
there anything where, you know, improving fan experience, getting more people in the door, ticket sales, that kind of thing, probably does drive revenue in ways that improving the experience in a poetry program won't, you know, in terms of facilities, you know, I'm a liberal arts major, so shout out to all US liberal arts majors out there. But Andy, any any differences you see, or is it all just kind of part of the bigger, you know, similar story, just different department? Yeah.
I mean, I think, I think Paul articulated, well, some of the challenges associated with decentralized nature, the university image, again, from a funding perspective. So we have what's considered the General Fund, which is all the colleges and units, but then athletics, student life, which is all of our student residence halls and student functions, and our Michigan University of Michigan healthcare, Michigan medicine, clinical operations, they all act very independently from a budget model perspective. And I'm sure if you ask athletics Michigan medicine or student life, what their number one mission critical priorities are, sustainability might not be at the very top right. And so they have to balance, I would say, their their priorities with the institutional sustainability goals and other priorities that we have from a funding perspective as well as from other perspectives. And so it's our job to work with closely with those units to come up with a plan and a program that's successful for all of us, so that we can continue making progress on the sustainability front and continue to meet their missions as well. Maybe
one thing I would add to that is a lot of what we do in athletics is in conflict philosophically with some sustainable practices. So, you know, we host 110,000 people at Michigan Stadium, seven or eight Saturdays per year. Think about how far folks are flying from various states, driving from various distances. You know, they're all coming to this one place. They're various modes of transportation. Our teams also fly all over the country. You know, the big 10 Conference footprint has expanded, and our teams need to go out to LA, to Oregon, to Washington to compete now. And so we realize that those are challenges. Those are challenges that facing the athletic department and facing all athletic departments across the country. So we're really trying to as we recognize and understand that and those things are difficult for us to change and control. So we are highly focused on the things that we can change and we can control such as our waste diversion, our energy management practices, our water conservation practices. That's what we're we know we can make an impact there, so we're trying to do so, yeah,
no, I that's appreciate that. And as a consultant who flies all over the country, I have similar, you know, working on sustainability, I've kind of, like even more of a dissonance in my work sometimes, you know, I'd like to believe, when I'm flying to do something good, that I'm making a bigger impact than the harm I'm causing in the process. But, I mean, how have you measured that, or how do you even the parts you can't control, like air travel, like, what's the just tell me a little bit more about how you guys have been thinking about that, getting understanding the fact that you don't control what the airlines do, or, yeah, and that is kind of inherently necessary to have a team in a in the big 10, yeah. I
mean, you know, if you ask me that question a year from now, I have a better answer for you, but we've done some things already. So air travel is one example. Are considered scope three carbon emissions, right? And the institution right now is in the process of establishing our scope three emission goals. So we're sort of in the midst of that, but we recognize that this is something that's an impact from a sustainability and carbon standpoint, and so we're doing some things right now to enter into a an agreement. With Delta Airlines for sustainable airplane fuel and SAF airplane fuel program for the entire University of Michigan that will enable us during all business travel, which would include athletes as well, to reduce carbon emissions associated with airplane travel. So we're doing that immediately before our scope three goals have been established, but that this topic in general, about the expansion of the conference, as Paul mentioned, is definitely a topic of conversation and and the associated environmental impact with the expansion of the conference. So
yeah, no, it definitely falls into that category of places that maybe the institution can influence, but doesn't directly control, but I'll be, I'll be anxious to hear how that goes, and maybe check back in with you in a couple of years, because it's, I think, something we're seeing. People have pretty good line of sight to scope one and two. Not to say those are easy by any means, but at least there's known strategies for getting at them. We talked quite a bit about, you know, waste. That's a, at least a well understood. It's got its own set of wicked problems associated with it. But I think there are at least ways that you can, like you've shown and some of the things you've talked about today, but air travel and, you know, general commuting and, you know, it's, there's, there's a lot there. So maybe shifting a little bit. You guys are a little more advanced. I mean, I've I travel to campuses all over the country, some of them don't even know what composting is, let alone, you know, have a robust composting program, for example. Or, you know, really have no energy efficiency to speak of, or don't have any goals. If you're going to talk to some of your colleagues around the country, and let's, we'll say maybe focus mostly on athletics here. But what advice would you get people at varying stages trying to get started. Where should they start? What lessons did you learn that you wish you would have done it a little differently? Maybe I love
the term rd, rip off and duplicate, right? I think that there are a lot of people like us. You can go look on the M go blue.com website and see what we're putting out there is our sustainability goals, initiatives. And I did the same thing. I went and looked at what my peers are doing at similar institutions across the conference and beyond. I also would recommend starting small, and I think many folks in athletics are probably already doing some things that check the box of sustainability, but you just need to take a step back and try to document. Look at your waste programs. Look at your energy conservation programs. Maybe you've already retrofitted LED bulbs in throughout your buildings, but if you take some time to document those efforts, calculate the paybacks, and then communicate that, get that out there, I think that's still an area where we have a lot of room for improvement. That we're doing a lot of great things, I think, but we could do a better job of communicating and getting people excited, and again, understanding that there are, there's some challenges with being sustainable in the collegiate athletic space, but trying to manage what we can and get that story out there and show folks that, hey, we actually, we do care about the environment. We're, you know, on 110,000 people here on Saturday, and we're really only sending less than two tons of waste to a landfill. Everything else is getting composted or recycled. I think that communication, that promotion component, is really important, and one we can do better.
That's great. One follow up there, Paul, you mentioned there were some places you looked at when you were getting started, what were some of those other institutions you might call out. I think
our peers in the big 10 are the obvious ones. Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan State, they all and even now, the California schools in Oregon and Washington have joined the conference. Many folks have good information out there on their websites, and I've talked to my peers at those institutions. One thing I that I think has helped us here is to take a campus first approach. Some other athletic departments have tried to establish their own sustainability goals and and priorities. We tried that a little bit to start, and I think we've pivoted and said, Hey, let's have the campus lead what we want to be all about, and then as an athletic department, we'll help with the university and the campus overall get there.
Interesting, yeah, Andy, any same question to you recommendations for people just getting started, and I'd be interested in Paul's comment about the campus led process first, because that's kind of your purview.
Yeah, I would just emphasize what Paul said about sort of not recreating the run, not trying to recreate the wheel. There are a lot of institutions out there that are far along in this journey in implementing sustainability throughout their athletics programs that they've learned along the way. So use those institutions as resources. Reach out to them, take a take a road trip, take a field trip. I think the other part of that success is critical, however, is to have leadership support and have somebody within the organization, within athletics, specifically, who wears a sustainability hat. Now, Paul does a lot of different things for athletics, but he's also been passionate about sustainability for a long time, and it's had a lot of responsibility in this space needs being critical to the success of implementing programs in our athletics program. So, you know, for other universities that really want to begin on this journey, you know, not have as an example, the sustainability program run out of a student office, right? Because students are only on campus for four or five years, and then they leave. So have have some kind of leadership support. Make sure has somebody there, a full time staff member with with background and operations would be very helpful, because a lot of this is operational context to it, and have that person be part of their job as a responsibility to create the program and then learn from others,
sweetie, the passion and the skill set, it sounds like, yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. I guess. One other leadership question I would have is I would imagine leading like with, you know, presidents, board members, you know, people at that stage athletics probably is a gateway drug for them, for sustainability as well, right? Like, that's a lot of like, they care about, obviously, the whole institution, and have different priorities themselves. But one common thread, at least I see with leadership, is they all care a lot about how the football team is doing, or the women's basketball team is doing, or, or whatever. Been in meetings where they'll talk about, hey, our lacrosse team is in the championship this week, and that's like, we can't get any work done because they're so focused on it. Have you found athletics to be a good tool to speak to that audience? Or am I just connecting dots? Aren't there? I say
that athletics is uniquely positioned on campus. You're right. You know, I think folks often refer to the big house as the front porch of the university, right? So it's super visible, accessible. People recognize and relate to it. It's been really important for our leadership and athletics to to make sure we're doing everything that we can and and without support. Award manual, our athletic director, a number of our sustainability efforts might not be funded or they might not be prioritized. So absolutely, it's important that the leadership has buy in and their support for folks to take on what might be considered extra work. So you know, Andy mentioned earlier, I'm not a sustainability person by training. I've been in facility management and operations here at the University for 15 years, and my role has evolved and expanded over time, and I've had to learn from others and lean on our campus experts to help me understand what we should be doing. But again, without that leadership support, funding, you know, and being able to dedicate time and effort isn't going to happen.
Yeah, I imagine back to your point about communication. That's probably critical for maintaining and expanding that support, for
sure. And I think most folks in leadership really, you said earlier that they identify with the sports teams, and then alumni get very excited when we win national championships, like like we did,
yeah? So that coming from Seattle, I probably won't highlight that. Maybe we can get that part out now. I'm just kidding.
Yeah, man, I think it's nice when you can tie both things together, right when, when the athletics teams are successful doing and they're doing things as well as they can. From a sustainability perspective, seems like an ideal scenario. That's
great. Yeah, just wrapping up any, any other things we didn't get into that you wanted to share about your programs. I mean,
I think one thing worth mentioning about, specifically about the stadium Zero Waste program, which I think is really great, is it's sort of a full circle program from a composting standpoint. And so all of the food waste, all of the compostable waste that's collected at the stadium actually goes out to the University of Michigan's campus farm, and they're going to be using all that collected from the stadium to turn it into active compost that they're going to use to grow vegetables on the farm, and the vegetables then are, many of them are served in our residence halls to our students. So it's a, it's a complete circular deal. Last year was the first year we piloted the program, and I believe they they captured ways from one game, or maybe two of the home games, just to see how, how well it went, I would say. And the campus farm loved it. I guess the compostable waste was clean it. It made really good compost. And so this year they're like, Hey, can we have the waste from all the games? And so that's just a really good story, I guess, right, that we're growing tomatoes. At the campus farm from compost from the stadium, and the tomatoes are served in the residence halls. So it's just a, it's a full circular kind of program there.
Great, yeah, and that's, if you can prove it's been done, then you can expand from there, which is amazing. So yeah, any final thoughts to share, Paul, before we head out? Yeah,
on, on that subject of getting clean compost that that remains one of our biggest challenges with the stadium Zero Waste program, despite the fact that we have great signage that we're doing some promotional videos, and we're doing our very best to educate folks. Some, some don't care, right? And they'll, they'll dispose of a plastic water bottle in the compost bin. So we're working on that. We do have teams that walk around on football game days, students that volunteer and and they're led by folks from Andy's team that walk around and try to educate. We don't have someone standing at every single bin like some other stadiums have tried. There's just too many. Our stadium concourse is too big. But, you know, walking around and trying to educate where they can it's, it still remains a problem. And so now we do have a dedicated team of folks that go out on a Monday morning to the campus farm and try to remove all the contamination to make sure that the compost is as clean as possible. I know some other stadiums do that in their parking lots, on their concourses. We're doing it right at the campus farm in a partnership with our janitorial services provider. Proved be super successful. Interesting,
yeah, now there's no end of complexity of creating a circular economy. That's a really good example. Well, I wanted to thank you both. This was great fun for me. I learned a lot about how to think about athletics. I hope you suffered through my winding questions today. So thanks again for agreeing to do this, and I look forward to hearing how things progress over the next couple of years. It sounds like you're just getting
started. That
sounds great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for having us. That's
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