Immediate Release: 2/4/08

Contact: Karon Klipple, Co-Chair, Environmental Stewardship Committee
San Diego City College, 619-388-3638
kklipple@sdccd.edu

SAN DIEGO CITY COLLEGE SELECTED FOR
PILOT SUSTAINABILITY RATING SYSTEM FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

San Diego , CA ….San Diego City College is among more than 90 college and university campuses selected to participate in the pilot phase of a rating system for sustainability in higher education developed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). The self-assessment system, called STARS (Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System), launches today, February 4 th. Participating college and university campuses will test the system over the course of 2008, and provide feedback to AASHE that will inform STARS version 1.0, planned for release in spring 2009.

City College is also competing in RecyleMania, a nation-wide competition with over 400 colleges and universities competing to see which college can recycle the most per capita. City College kicks off RecycleMania tomorrow and Wednesday, February 5 th and 6 th in the student cafeteria with student contests, games, prizes and music and live dance all based on the recycling theme. RecycleMania awards its Grand Champion based upon who recycles the greatest overall percentage of their solid waste stream. Additional recognition is given to schools that collect the most paper, beverage containers, cardboard, and food waste for recycling, as well as the school that collects the greatest overall amount of recyclables.

The RecycleMania competition is administered by the National Recycling Coalition (NRC), endorsed by NRC's College and University Recycling Council and the US Environmental Protection Agency’s WasteWise program, and supported by the generous financial contribution provided by the Coca-Cola Company.

“ City College is really excited to be a part of this pro-active environmental effort with the opportunity to educate thousands of students,” said Karon Klipple, Co-Chair of the City College Environmental Stewardship Committee.

The STARS 90-plus participating campuses were selected to represent a wide range of institutional types, sizes, and geography. They include public and private schools, community colleges and research universities.

STARS is designed to:

• Help gauge the progress of colleges and universities toward sustainability in all sectors, from governance and operations to academics and community engagement.
• Enable meaningful comparisons across institutions as well as benchmarking within institutions.
• Create incentives for continuous improvement toward sustainability.
• Facilitate information sharing about sustainability practices and performance in higher education
• Build a stronger, more diverse campus sustainability community.

Given the rapid growth of sustainability initiatives at institutions of higher education in North America, measuring and assessing progress toward sustainability goals has become increasingly important. While many institutions have undertaken sustainability assessments and while a variety of assessment tools are available, there is currently no system that translates disparate sustainability indicators into a single metric that enables both institutional benchmarking and easy comparison across a large number of campuses in terms of overall level of achievement.

“The launch of the pilot phase is a major milestone in the development of STARS,” said Judy Walton, AASHE’s acting executive director. “It has taken nearly two years of hard work and the contributions of hundreds of individuals from every sector of the higher education community to bring us to this point.”

The system is similar to the LEED (Leadership in Energy Environmental Design) green building rating system. STARS, however, is applied to an entire campus rather than a single building or set of buildings and evaluates social responsibility as well as environmental stewardship. Campuses may earn credits in three categories – 1) Curriculum and Research, 2) Operations, and 3) Administration and Finance. Within each category are subsections of credits, ranging from “purchasing” and “buildings” in Operations to “investment” and “planning” in Administration and Finance.

For a list of participating institutions see: http://www.aashe.org/stars/pilot_institutions.php

For other information about STARS, including a copy of the Pilot Phase One Guide, see: www.aashe.org/stars.

For City College Environmental Stewardship Committee, see: www.sdcity.edu/esc

To learn more about RecycleMania, see; www.recyclemaniacs.org.

San Diego City College is a downtown urban college offering 1,500 day, evening, weekend and online classes to more than 16,000 students each semester.   City College is part of the San Diego Community College District, comprised of City College, Mesa College, Miramar College, and Continuing Education.

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