LiveGreen: Big plans

Big things are happening all around campus, and that includes sustainability. I hope you saw last week’s announcement about the campuswide Sustainability Master Plan. I’m really excited about it, so I wanted to make sure you knew all about it.

LIVEGREEN

by Melanie Stewart

First, a little history. Sustainability became a campus focus for both UNMC and Nebraska Medicine in 2010. As initiatives involving employees and facilities-based projects were implemented, the environmental, financial and health benefits became tangible. With no real plan on how to move forward, both entities asked Verdis Group to develop a sustainability master plan for them. This involved a crazy amount of data collection to determine baselines on how the campus was operating, and to come up with reasonable, yet impactful goals.

To do this, focus groups consisting of an assortment of people on campus were held and campus leaders were engaged. Decision-making personnel involved in the areas of focus helped by providing information and opinions. After the draft was written, all involved were allowed to view and make comments. At about this time it became clear that the enterprise was going to go through some major changes, so Verdis was asked to combine the two master plans into one plan covering the entire/combined campus.

That is the plan that was released last week, which will guide us over the next 10 years. It’s an impressive document: baselines, defined goals, and specific guidelines on how to reach those goals. No time to read the whole thing? There’s a short executive summary at the beginning and each goal-area is broken into sections.

You can find the Sustainability Master Plan on our new LiveGreen website. As you may know, UNMC and Nebraska Medicine combined green teams last year to better serve the campus as a whole, but we’ve still been operating with two websites. The new website is going to provide a single place to post information and keep you informed about what’s going on.

While we continue to build/update it the ‘old’ pages will still be available, but the plan is to have information migrated over in January and to operate off this page alone. We’ll also be utilizing the ‘blog’ feature to help keep you up-to-date on local, national, and worldwide sustainability.