By Katie Koenig
While researching college sustainability efforts, I generally look for the most eye-catching, unique initiatives I can find. Something like a “big ticket item” to add to this series every once in a while. “Sustainability” is such a broad term that I want to find efforts that really push the limits of what other colleges are doing.
What are colleges doing beyond recycling initiatives and donation drives? What are things that shock me? Surprise me?
ASU, consider me surprised.
Arizona State University came up in my research for their incredibly in-depth campus sustainability reports and their broad variety of environmental initiatives. In their 2024 Sustainability Impact Review, they mention having an online waste directory. This isn’t too unusual. MIT has the Waste Wizard where you search an item and it tells you where and how to dispose of it. Recycle Smart, a Massachusetts educational organization, has Recyclopedia.
However, I did a little googling to look more into it, and I found something much more intensive. There is article after blog after article from the late 2000s talking about ASU’s Campus Metabolism Dashboard. There is even a Wikipedia article about the dashboard.
Essentially, it’s an interactive website that allows anyone to view energy usage in buildings, comparing numbers to prior times, whether in prior months or even years, and walking through individual rooms and seeing how much energy it takes to leave the lights on or run heating. It breaks energy usage down to its minutia, exactly the kind of individual understanding and relevance that I personally love to explore.
The second surprise was that I couldn’t get the website to load. From what I can tell, the website runs on Adobe Flash Player, and with Adobe blocking all websites that use Flash as of 2021, the Campus Metabolism Dashboard just… won’t load.
From pictures I can find, it looks like it provides live graphs and demoed rooms that you can scroll through and interact with, flipping virtual switches and thermostats to experiment with the amount of energy it takes to run a dorm room, or an office, or a whole building. It’s a beautiful set-up, incredibly well-informed, and integrated into what looks to be a reasonably intuitive user interface.
ASU has always had sustainability and carbon neutrality at the forefront of its thoughts, all the way back in the early 2000s when this project was first thought up by Joby Carlson and implemented in an interdepartmental effort across campus, two of whom being the office of the University Architect and the National Center of Excellence on SMART Innovations. The Dashboard does require specialized data monitors and sensitive recording tools, but it isn’t impossible to set up. In 2011, ASU actually expanded it beyond its initial one building on their Tempe campus to cover all 21 solar plants and 24 different buildings across the campus.
At one point, the Dashboard was actually displayed in front of one of its buildings on campus.
Other universities offer interactive web pages for different resources, the most common one being recycling directories and databases to see what and where different items should be disposed of.
ASU demonstrates that there are other applications of this kind of interactive, educational website. It delighted me to find the Campus Metabolism Dashboard, and disappointed me when I couldn’t find a working link. What if there could be an interactive website of live waste data? Or something that breaks down waste data by student, or by building—and you could experiment to see how much a full dormitory of students ends up wasting if each student throws out a certain number of pounds of trash and recycling per week.
That’s just one idea, though.
Unfortunately, I’m no programmer despite my love of exploring websites where I can fiddle with the settings. I’d love to see more universities build online resources.
So many sustainability and environmentally conscious efforts among universities fall within the same trends. Whether those are waste diversion efforts, energy efficiency initiatives, or donation drives, a lot of universities fall within the well-worn tracks of pre-existing ideas. It makes sense to start basic, of course, before leaping into massive initiatives and costly building projects. However, universities sometimes seem to stall after this first step, often lacking the resources to breach into larger efforts.
Not every project is financially or labor-intensive, though. ASU is an example of what an institution can do with more resources. Other colleges that I cover, such as Boston University’s bike donation program—an unusual donation program compared to the usual clothing and book drives—demonstrate what institutions can do on a budget.
No matter where we stand, as individuals or as part of a larger organization, we can all think outside of the box. We don’t have to create from nothing, either, instead taking inspiration and clues from the efforts of others, building community efforts to make our lives more sustainable.