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 its day of work. Students walking past cross to the opposite side of the road to avoid dirt kicked up from the construction site, and crane their necks to see what’s really going on inside.
The new building is just a small part of campus growth the university hopes to accomplish over the coming years. Elon’s campus master plan, created in 2016, outlines the projected avenues of campus growth for the foreseeable future and provides a structure for what construction projects the university will work on and 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 U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Elon University’s Sustainability Master Plan attempts to solve this, outlining the university’s sustainability goals for the foreseeable future, including a goal for a carbon neutral university by 2037. According to Elaine Durr, director of sustainability at Elon, 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,” Durr 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, which says any new construction or renovations exceeding 8,000 square feet of conditioned, occupied space will achieve LEED certification, preferably at the Silver level.
LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the leading green building certification and rating system in the United States. Implemented by the U.S. Green Building Council, there are four different levels of certification buildings can achieve, from basic certification up to Silver, Gold and Platinum. Each level requires a different set of checklists a building must reach in order to qualify for that certification status, with Platinum certification being considered most sustainable.
“LEED certification provides a third-party verification of the strategies incorporated into the project, which provides credibility,” Durr said. “LEED certified buildings are typically more resource efficient than non-LEED certified buildings.”
Buildings can achieve LEED certification by meeting requirements on the various checklists for buildings, and the more items ticked off, the higher a building’s rating will be. Only specific projects require recertification under LEED, and Elon currently does not have buildings that fall under that ranking, according to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. Even with major renovations within the coming year, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll go through the certification process, said Brad Moore, university architect and director of planning, design and construction management.
“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,” 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 toward 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 multiple studies over the past 20 years regarding the efficacy of LEED in reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in commercial buildings.
“The U.S. 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 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 there is no impact — positive or negative — on national energy efficiency by LEED certified buildings.
Additionally, there is often 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, said many universities use LEED as a way to appear sustainable to their campus community, when in reality, there’s not much 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 the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System, 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.”
According to AASHE, at 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 campus that is both larger and more sustainable, a dynamic that seems to contradict itself.
“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.”