St. Paul’s has become a Silver pledging member with Sustainable Waterloo Region’s Regional Carbon Initiative, which means the College commits to reducing emissions by 40 percent over the next 10 years. It had previously been an observing member for two and a half years.
Sustainable Waterloo Region is an organization that facilitates target-setting and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
“We felt it was time to make this commitment, said Lindsay Restagno, Director of Operations at St. Paul’s. “Not only is it in keeping with our mission and values, it’s a reasonable demand to make of ourselves at a practical level.”
St. Paul’s has already enacted a number of emission-cutting projects, including starting a program to change all lighting to LED, adding motion-sensors where feasible, and switching to high-efficiency boilers in the graduate apartment building.
Future projects include more LED lighting upgrades, replacing old boilers in the undergrad building with high-efficiency units, installing individual temperature control on occupancy sensors in residence dorm rooms, and a strong push on educating and engaging all staff, faculty, students, and tenants in reducing energy consumption.
“LED lighting is so efficient and has come down significantly in price over the last year or so, and the rebates available make it an easy decision to replace existing lighting with LED,” said Facilities Coordinator Peter Pillsworth. He added that the two high-efficiency boilers that were installed in the graduate apartment building to provide redundancy resulted in a significant drop in natural gas consumption, so it only makes sense to do the same with the undergrad building.
Pillsworth said, “With everything that we have done from a facilities standpoint, we realize that people’s energy usage habits have a significant impact on our energy usage. This is why we want to help people understand that little changes to their everyday lives can have very big impacts on our emissions.”