Goshen College President Jim Brenneman, NIPSCO’s Manager of Public Affairs Angela Nelson and Goshen College Sustainability Coordinator and Utilities Manager Glenn Gilbert hold up a representational “green carbon footprint.”

Goshen College President Jim Brenneman announced today that the college has taken a major step by voluntarily purchasing all of its electricity from renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power. This single action will reduce the college’s carbon footprint by about 45 percent.

The college is the first major customer of NIPSCO, the regional electricity provider, to take this action and participate in its new Green Power Program.

“What this means for Goshen College is that going forward from today, no more coal, gas or oil will be burned, no more carbon dioxide will be introduced into the atmosphere to provide electricity for our campus,” Brenneman said during an all-campus convocation. Before this step, the equivalent of 24 train cars of coal were needed (or about 12 tons per student) to provide electricity to campus each year. Coal is Indiana’s primary energy source.

In 2007, Brenneman became a charter signatory to the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. In doing so, he joined with leaders of 175 other higher education institutions in agreement to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions. Goshen College was one of two higher education institutions in Indiana and the first Mennonite college or university to sign the landmark climate commitment. There now are 664 signatories.

Goshen College President Jim Brenneman

“We did that because we are very concerned about life on this planet, it was one more way we can care for the world and it was part of our broader ecological stewardship commitment,” Brenneman said. “Goshen College, like the Mennonite Church which we are a part of, has always been committed to being global citizens. 

By signing up for this program – which is recently available to all customers – NIPSCO buys renewable energy certificates (RECs) on the college’s behalf. RECs are the environmental attributes associated with electricity that is generated from renewable sources. NIPSCO Green Power Program RECs are certified through Green-e® Energy, the nation’s leading renewable energy certification and verification program. Green-e® Energy provides independent, third-party certification to ensure that certified renewable energy meets strict environmental and consumer-protection standards.

Participants in the program pay a monthly premium in addition to the standard electric rate, which goes entirely to pay for the RECs. 

In response to the college’s energy efficiency efforts and commitment to sustainability, NIPSCO’s Manager of Public Affairs Angela Nelson presented a $5,000 check to the college’s Ecological Stewardship Committee to help with further initiatives on campus in the future.

Since 2007, the college has been very successful at energy conservation. “In that time, both natural gas and electrical consumption have been reduced by over 25 percent,” said Glenn Gilbert, the campus’ sustainability coordinator and utilities manager. “Conservation will continue to be a major component of our strategy.” The college is using about the same amount of electricity on campus today as it did in 1992, despite adding 290,000 more square feet of building space.

Gilbert added, “We seek to be leaders in environmental sustainability and to model a safe and effective way for our society to move away from dependency on fossil fuel-based energy sources that have proven to be so destructive to our environment.”

To learn more about the college’s various green initiatives – including composting, prairie planting, making biodiesel, powering hot showers with solar panels and others – visit http://www.goshen.edu/gogreen.

Goshen College junior Natasha Weisenbeck, a public relations major from Clifton, Ill., is a student volunteer on the composting team. At the end of every day, a student volunteer spends 15 minutes collecting receptacles in the dining hall with all the food waste and dumping the contents into the campus compost bin, a large insulated wooden box located behind the dining hall dumpsters. Woodchips are added which introduces bacteria to the food, preventing odors and helping break up the pile. (Photo by Jodi H. Beyeler/Goshen College Communications and Marketing Office)

Where might you find coffee grounds, potato skins and egg shells mixed with meat, napkins and leftover spaghetti? Typically, beside other garbage in the dump. In fact, for years, this is where Goshen College sent its food waste.

However, in 2010 the college implemented a much better practice by taking something perceived as dirty trash and transforming it into something of value: compost. Beginning with a trial run that received enthusiastic support, the college began composting food waste in the dining hall. It has evolved to become a successful model due to the strong commitment of students and the implementation of a simple composting method.

This system – low-cost and low-tech – works well for a small college serving over 200 mouths per meal in the cafeteria. Goshen College Sustainability Coordinator Glenn Gilbert said, “What I like about this approach to composting is its simplicity and community engagement. Rather than invest in a complicated expensive form of technology that operates in the background, Goshen College has chosen to rely on student involvement, creating a simple system, that is easily replicable almost anywhere.”

Student energy and commitment

All students that eat in the dining hall participate in the process by scraping their food waste into special containers. Student volunteers are also critical to the daily maintenance and implementation of this project. The college’s student environmental club, EcoPAX, organizes the volunteers.

Junior Natasha Weisenbeck, a public relations major from Clifton, Ill., is one of those students. “It takes dedicated, excited people to engage and participate in the process, much like what we have here at Goshen,” she said.

In addition to volunteering with the student compost team for three years, she served as the campus compost intern last summer. Combining her passions for the environment and communication, she created tutorials, maintained the composting process and even solved a problem that has greatly improved the college’s approach.

Goshen College junior Natasha Weisenbeck uses the screener that she designed and built, which separates the woodchips from the compost which has been decomposing for up to three months prior. (Photo by Jodi H. Beyeler/Goshen College Communications and Marketing Office)

Weisenbeck identified the need for a better compost screening solution (to separate the final product from the woodchips which are combined with the food waste). She designed and constructed an innovative creation: a pivot screener which hangs on a 20-degree angle and hits bumpers allowing the compost waste to fall through the screen and be collected. The woodchips tumble to the end. This cuts the time in half from the prior – more basic approach – and creates a better quality final product.

At the United States Composting Council’s annual conference in late January 2013, Weisenbeck presented on the growth of the college’s composting program and demonstrated its simplicity for others to learn from. The college’s program was “definitely an outlier at the convention because we are so small. We’re unique in the sense that our operation is very low-tech and extremely low cost,” said Weisenbeck. “There was nothing else like it there.”

In addition to the significant role students play in making this program happen, the support and assistance of the AVIFresh dining hall staff is critical. If AVIFresh hadn’t been fully behind the project from the beginning, “it is unlikely that food waste composting at Goshen College would be a reality,” said Weisenbeck. As well, Gilbert and Lew Naylor, an adjunct chemistry professor and international composting consultant, provide vital technical support, and Naylor has provided generous funding to support the project.

A low-cost approach

A benefit of the simple approach is that it is cost-effective, with just an 8-month payback. This is the result of using student labor and a reduction in garbage bags and landfill costs. The composting boxes – designed by Naylor, Gilbert and students – only cost about $150 in materials to build. Compared to alternatives, composters that use electricity are as much as 10 to 100 times the cost.

Even if all of the labor was paid instead of volunteer, composting saves the college money. Between waste pickup fees and garbage bag savings in the kitchen, the college saves an estimated $1,800 per semester.

A low-tech approach

On a typical weekday during the semester, about 75 to 100 pounds of food waste is produced in the college’s dining hall. When students are done eating, they have the option to scrape fruit, meat, napkins and any other compostable waste from their plates into waste receptacles clearly designated for composting.

At the end of a day, a student volunteer spends 15 minutes collecting the receptacles and dumping all of the contents into the campus compost bin, a large insulated wooden box located behind the dining hall dumpsters. Woodchips – received free from local tree trimmers – are added as mulch and combined with the food waste at a two-to-one ratio to provide airflow. This introduces bacteria to the food, which prevents odors and helps break up the pile.

On-site composting lasts for at least three weeks, self-heating to more than 140°F. Once full, a composter is transported to an on-campus location and replaced by an empty container. Decomposition continues for up to three more months prior to a screening process, during which the woodchips are separated and removed, using Weisenbeck’s pivot screener.

The cycle is complete when the compost is returned to AVIFresh dining services to be used as a natural fertilizer in their small garden, which eventually produces vegetables and herbs for meals to be served to students. In 2011, the compost-treated garden provided the dining hall with 88 pounds of plum tomatoes, 35 pounds of heirloom tomatoes, 71 batches of basil, and other vegetables like kale and peapods for immediate or frozen use. 

View a video of Weisenbeck putting the pivot screener to use:

– By Kristina Lopienski

A workshop, “Exploring Northern Indiana’s Ground Water Resources,” will be held on Saturday, Nov. 3 from 9 a.m. to noon at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center

covered Northern Indiana. But how vulnerable is our groundwater to contamination? Are we using our groundwater wisely or abusing it?

A workshop, “Exploring Northern Indiana’s Ground Water Resources,” will be held on Saturday, Nov. 3 from 9 a.m. to noon at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College in Wolf Lake, Ind., at its Farmstead Site. It will cover these issues and offer community members new insights into the tap water they depend on daily.

Dr. Larry Yoder and Jeff Yoder will lead the workshop. The former is a director emeritus of Merry Lea and longtime glacial geology buff who likes to call the Great Lakes region “the Saudi Arabia of the world’s water supply.” The latter is a water resources engineer who has spent 15 years working on rural water development in Southeast Asia. The two Yoders will be able to provide some lively contrasts illustrating the impact differing geologies have on water supply.

Practical questions the workshops will answer include, “How far down do those plastic water pipes sticking out of the ground in the countryside go?” and “Why does water sometimes have a sulphur taste?”

The workshop will be taught at the level of adult general interest. Specialized background is not expected. Brunch is included in the cost of $15. The student rate is $10. To register, call (260) 799-5869 or email jenniferhs@goshen.edu.

Seven students, most of whom are environmental science majors, will launch their canoes from Mallard Roost Wetland Conservation Area, east of Ligonier, Ind., on Tuesday, September 18. They’ll paddle northwest, tracing the path of the Elkhart River as it winds its way through Ligonier, Goshen and Elkhart and joins the St. Joe River. They’ll then follow the St. Joe through South Bend, Niles and Berrien Springs, ending in Benton Harbor where the St. Joe meets Lake Michigan.

Along the way, students will test the water quality of the rivers. They’ll also visit a wide variety of residents and institutions along their path. Among the stops are a a gravel quarry, a solar company, and a church that developed an interest in water quality because they baptize in the Elkhart River. They’ll also speak with a chef, see a hydropower installation in South Bend and meet a county commissioner.

The watershed trip offers opportunities for collaboration with faculty and students from other universities. In South Bend, the SSR students will spend an evening with students and faculty from the Center for a Sustainable Future, Indiana University South Bend (IUSB). In Berrien Springs, they will share a cookout with Andrews University students and faculty and tour a dairy farm and wastewater treatment plant on campus.

The SSR canoe trip and the courses that follow it are part of a pedagogy called problem-based learning. This form of learning places more responsibility on students to figure out what they need to know and how they can learn it. The faculty are guides and coaches rather than “sages on stage,” and the entire watershed is the laboratory.

For example, in the SSR’s Landscape Limnology course, instructor Lisa Zinn, Wolf Lake, Ind., has posed the question, “How does Merry Lea affect the water quality of the headwaters of the Elkhart River, and what could Merry Lea do to better protect these headwaters?” Students will spend the bulk of the course seeking answers.

On an orientation hike on Merry Lea’s property, Dr. Dave Ostergren, who teaches an environmental policy course in the SSR, challenged the students to consider what policies had shaped the landscape they hiked through and what bodies made those policies.

The SSR culminates in an environmental problem-solving project that challenges students to address a local environmental problem.

“We began planning for the SSR in 1999,” Luke Gascho, Merry Lea’s executive director, told the SSR students on their first day at Merry Lea. That year, when the current SSR students were in second or third grade, Merry Lea staff resolved to develop innovative undergraduate programs on site that would immerse students in the landscapes they are studying. The long process included construction of Rieth Village, a platinum-rated LEED® facility where the students now live.

- By Jennifer Schrock

Shared meals are an important part of the Autumn Hope Conference. Many of the vegetables used are grown on site by Merry Lea’s agroecology program.

WOLF LAKE, Ind. — How do people of faith understand their relationship to their land, and how do they live on it? This is the focus of a Autumn Hope Conference at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College on Sept. 28-30.

“Learning from Long Traditions” is the theme of the 2012 weekend conference. This annual faith-based event is a blend of outdoor hikes, input from guest speakers, reflection and worship. Dr. Luke Gascho, Merry Lea’s executive director, will serve as moderator for the event.

“Understanding the ‘long traditions’ of our neighbors is critical to our being able to live sustainably on this planet in the future,” Gascho says. He sees careful listening as a form of the Christian call to love one’s neighbors.

The group, Medicine Woman Singers will share traditional Miami rhythms and songs during the Learning from Long Traditions conference.

Guest speakers representing several cultural groups will reflect on the people/land relationship. Dani Tippmann, Arcola, Ind., is a member of the Miami Nation of Indiana as well as the director of the Whitley County Historical Museum. Tippmann will take participants to an area of Merry Lea’s property where Miami people were known to congregate. She will also lead a night hike featuring Miami star stories and demonstrate uses of traditional Miami corn.

In addition, the group, Medicine Woman Singers will share Miami rhythms and songs. The group takes its name from the traditional drum used, which is called a medicine woman. Jerry Anders, Lagro, Ind., who organizes the group, describes their music as a labor of love. “It’s never ‘just a gig’ for them,” Tippmann comments.

A plot of Miami corn, planted at Merry Lea by Tippmann, braved the summer’s drought. The variety was all but lost when the Miami were relocated to Oklahoma, but has recently been recovered through an ear preserved as a mantlepiece decoration. Before European settlement, the Miami raised hundreds of acres of corn across Northern Indiana and used it as the basis of their economy.

Dr. Wilma Bailey, a professor of Hebrew and Aramaic scripture at Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Ind., will offer an ancient Israelite perspective on the people/land relationship, which has been preserved in scriptures such as the story of Adam, Eve and a serpent in Genesis 3. Bailey points out that many readers overlook the text’s attention to land resources and how they are to be divided between animals and humans.

Dr. Laura Yoder, who teaches in the Sustainability and Environmental Education Department at Merry Lea, lived in Asia for over 10 years. Yoder will show photographs of sacred groves she visited and help participants grasp a worldview where certain places are believed to be inhabited by deities. Beliefs such as these function as environmental protection in some parts of the world.

Participants will also reflect on their own “long traditions” regarding land care, and have an opportunity to share stories from their families or religious or cultural heritage.

A schedule and registration form for Learning from Long Traditions is available at http://merrylea.goshen.edu/news-events/events/autumn-hope-conferenceor by calling 260-799-5869. The weekend registration fee of $115 includes all events and five meals. Lodging is on your own.