Constructing campus conversation: the state of sustainability at Elon University

With building and campus growth being at the forefront of Elon University's goals, some sustainability initiatives come into question

By Samantha Hess

Every morning the droning beep of a crane backing up can be heard around Elon University’s campus as the Innovation Quad construction crew begins their day of work. Students walking past cross to the opposite side of the road to avoid dirt kicked up from the construction site, but can’t help but crane their necks to see what’s really going on inside.

The shiny new building advertised around campus is just a small part in the campus growth the university hopes to accomplish over the coming years. Elon’s campus master plan, created in 2016, outlines the projected campus growth for the foreseeable future, and provides a structure for what construction projects the university will work on when. This campus growth has serious sustainability implications not only due to the larger student population it will bring in, but also because of the facilities themselves. Buildings accounted for 40% of the country’s total energy consumption in 2020, 30% of which can be attributed to coal-burning power plants, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Elon University’s Sustainability Master Plan, attempts to find a solution to this which outlines the university’s sustainability goals for the foreseeable future, including a goal for a carbon neutral university by 2037. According to Brad Moore, the university architect and director of planning, design and construction management, active construction on campus does not get reported as part of the university’s net carbon emissions.

“Elon does not include carbon emissions from construction projects in the annual carbon inventory,” Elaine Durr, director of sustainability at Elon, said. “The primary way buildings are represented in Elon’s annual carbon inventory is through energy consumption.”

The sustainability plan also incorporates the Elon Green Building Policy from 2009, that says any new construction or renovations exceeding 8,000 square feet of conditioned, occupied space will achieve LEED certification, preferably at the silver level.

According to Brad Moore, contractors for Elon University construction sites go through a lengthy process before chosen to work on site. Photo credit: Samantha Hess

Photo Credits: Samantha Hess

There's no specific type of machinery they avoid using on site for sustainability purposes, especially as campus construction does not account for the university's carbon emissions report. Photo credits: Samantha Hess

Photo Credits: Samantha Hess

Photo credits: Samantha Hess

Construction creates a stark contrast to the rest of campus, and the Innovation Quad site sits right in the middle of it all. Photo credits: Samantha Hess

Photo credits: Samantha Hess

LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the leading green building certification and rating system in the United States, implemented by the US Green Building Council, or USGBC. There are different levels of certification buildings can achieve, the first being basic certification, then Silver, Gold and Platinum.

“LEED certification provides a third-party verification of the strategies incorporated into the project, which provides credibility,” Elaine Durr said. “LEED certified buildings are typically more resource efficient than non-LEED certified buildings.”

LEED Silver certificate for Schar Hall and Steers Pavilion at Elon University. Certificates like this one hang, as well as a plaque, hang in every LEED certified building on campus. Photo credits: Samantha Hess.

LEED Silver certificate for Schar Hall and Steers Pavilion at Elon University. Certificates like this one hang, as well as a plaque, hang in every LEED certified building on campus. Photo credits: Samantha Hess.

Buildings can achieve this LEED certification by meeting requirements on the various LEED checklists for buildings, and the more items ticked off, the higher a building’s rating will be. An important note about LEED certification, is there is no requirement for recertification. Only LEED for existing buildings, or LEED for Building Operations and Maintenance requires recertification, and Elon University currently has zero buildings that fall under that ranking, according to The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). One of their major programs, the sustainability tracking and assessment system, or STARS, is an opt-in service for universities to report their sustainability operations and receive rankings based on their reports. Elon is a university that opts into this program.

Scofield said using energy when unnecessary can be one of the major ways LEED buildings fall short in addition to energy efficiency. Schar Hall and McEwen Dining Hall, two LEED certified buildings on Elon's campus, keep lights and screens on at all hours of the day and night. Photo credits: Samantha Hess

The places where LEED for Building Operations and Maintenance could happen is in building renovations. But even with major renovations within the coming year, Moore said it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll go through the certification process.

“If you're not going in and completely renovating the HVAC system, and if you're not completely doing things around the site, you won't get the points in those categories [for LEED checklists],” Moore said. “In the things that we are touching, we are using those design components, but in which we're not going through that process. Because we're not completely changing out those systems.”

While LEED is certainly a place for commercial buildings to start on their journey towards sustainability, there have been studies questioning the effectiveness of LEED, and whether it serves more as sustainable decoration for commercial buildings. John Scofield, professor of physics at Oberlin College, has conducted a multitude of studies over the past 20 years regarding the efficacy of LEED in reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in commercial buildings.

“The US Green Building Council has made LEED a sexy thing through marketing and these nice plaques,” Scofield said. “But there is what we call an energy performance gap. You know, the design team puts together a building and brags about how much energy it's going to save and how little energy it’ll use. And then the owner moves in, occupies the building and discovers it uses a whole lot more energy than the design team said.”

Scofield said, essentially, while LEED projects make some key changes, such as LED light fixtures, low flush toilets and specific plans for stormwater runoff, as a whole, they do no better in energy conservation or greenhouse gas emissions than a non-LEED certified building.

One of Scofield’s articles identifies that LEED certified buildings only reduce net carbon emissions by 5%, which isn’t enough to truly combat climate change, or reach any sort of carbon neutrality goal. Another study from the Institute of Labor Economics finds that there is no impact, positive or negative, on national energy efficiency by LEED certified buildings.

Similar to what Scofield touches upon in his research, the majority of LEED certified buildings don’t require recertification, and often there is no mechanism for measuring their actual efficacy past the design prototype stage. Connor Leidner, a senior architecture student with a focus in design sustainability at Virginia Tech University, says many universities use LEED as a way to appear sustainable to their campus community, when in reality there’s not much really occurring behind the scenes.

“LEED allows for tax breaks for many developers and companies, but does very little to help the environment,” Leidner said. “There are some firms that take LEED seriously and do produce more sustainable buildings, but that’s in their own good nature, and not necessarily a benefit of getting LEED certified.”

Some of the struggles behind making these lasting sustainability changes to college campuses are rooted in the finances. Not only is it expensive to invest more in sustainable construction and architecture, but it’s especially more expensive to keep that up once the construction is over and the building is occupied.

Julian Deautremont, director of programs for AASHE, said for the majority of universities reporting to STARS, their financial situations prevent them from truly investing in sustainable technology that would make those differences on campus.

“Investment and finance come to mind, which have a couple questions about how the endowment is managed, and socially responsible investing, which is a tricky issue in many campuses, right, where historically the endowment has been invested to achieve financial return, and that is the primary or even a sole goal of the endowment management,” Deautremont said. “STARS is rewarding points for social and environmental considerations in that process.”

For Elon University, only 2.6% of the institution’s investment pool goes into positive sustainability investments, and in terms of a committee on investor responsibility and investment disclosure (the two other subheads under the investment and finance section of STARS) there were no points awarded to the university.

In order to grow the university in the way outlined in the campus master plan, sustainability is something that becomes a struggle sometimes, especially with recent supply chain issues due to COVID-19, according to Moore. The struggle towards a sustainable campus, and a larger one at the same time, is a dynamic that seems to contradict itself at times.

“I guess the most sustainable thing to do would be to not do any construction. But, you know, we can't meet our mission of educating future generations if we're not growing,” Moore said. “So given that we have to do construction, then we look at how we can limit the environmental impact for the future, even in the smallest ways.”