The Virginia Tech Board of Visitors has adopted paperless meetings, while at the same time approving a university-wide climate action commitment.Late last year, rector of the board John Lawson, directed the university to implement a paperless method of sharing information by the June 2009 meeting. "I felt like we not only needed to make a institutional statement about sustainability, we needed to take actions ourselves, as a board, to ratchet back the use of expendables for each meeting," says Lawson.
"Believe it or not, preparing all these materials was a massive undertaking," says Kim O'Rourke, secretary to the board. Preparing 35 three-ring binders for board and staff, each averages about 200 pages prepared by many different offices, and shipping to each board member cost the university about $11,800 each year.
Assembling those books also required about $4,600 in staff time. "So, conservatively, we spent about $16,400 each year preparing the all the reports, resolutions, and materials to support the board meetings,' says O'Rourke.
With an up-front expenditure of about $26,000 for laptop computers, the university expects to get a payback in less than two years and make one small step to improve our carbon footprint.
In another action—quite a bit more important, actually, for the entire school’s future--the board adopted a resolution to fully support the university's climate action commitment . It is an important step for the university to take in order to become a national leader in campus sustainability.
After a year of community input and review, Virginia Tech has now adopted a 14 point Climate Action Commitment and Sustainability Plan which calls for, among other things, to pursue LEED Silver certification or better for all new buildings and renovations, a 35 percent recycle rate by 2012, specific targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, reductions in electric usage, improvements in transportation efficiency, and many other measurable sustainability goals.
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