SRJC’s Steps Toward Sustainability

By Dharma Niles

Temperatures rise, waters rise and now tensions rise, as climate change becomes an increasingly prominent topic in legislation and politics across the world — with 53% of Americans having experienced extreme weather in recent years, according to a CBS News poll.

From fire to floods, Sonoma County is no stranger to the devastations of natural disasters amid a changing climate. As student concern for sustainability surges and the issue’s presence becomes ever-pressing, Santa Rosa Junior College proceeds in an ambitious pursuit of achieving zero energy, zero water, zero waste and carbon neutrality by 2030.

“We have come a long way,” said SRJC Waste Diversion Technician Guy Tillotson regarding SRJC’s sustainability progress and plans over the course of his seven years on campus. “But we have lots of goals.”

SRJC’s Sustainability Committee, composed of students, faculty, classified staff and administrators, outlines how to al- locate resources — notably $35 million from the Measure H Bond — and plan for an environmentally-friendly college in “Sustainable SRJC Greenprint,” a document President Dr. Frank Chong initially signed in 2015.

New drafts of “Greenprint 2.0” are now in the works, outlining initiatives within eight distinct categories, including transportation, curriculum and education, engagement and culture, resource use and climate, built environment, economics, food, and administration and organization.

“This district tries to put its attention on students and student support more than anything else,” Tillotson said. “So the committee and I are always like, ‘Don’t forget about sustainability; keep working on it a little bit.’”

Throughout the past decade, SRJC pursued several of these developments in the college’s infrastructure and practices — many of which are materializing in physical structures and administrative decisions today.

Zero net energy

Achieving zero net energy will require SRJC’s energy consumption to be equivalent to or below its renewable energy production.

“There’s holistic planning around how much energy we’re using and where it’s going,” SRJC Energy and Sustainability Manager David Liebman said.

SRJC’s largest source of renewable energy is photovoltaic arrays and solar panels, placed on buildings and carports. Estimated to save more than $1 million a year, the systems complement each other to provide an estimated 60% of energy needed to run the Santa Rosa campus, 100% at the Petaluma campus, 100% at the Public Safety Training Center and 90% at Shone Farm. They’re also expected to be implemented at the Southwest Center during its ongoing construction process.

“The big change is beginning to see that we are making a sustainable energy infrastructure system,” Liebman said.

“How do we start generating our energy as close to us as possible, how do we store that energy and how do we efficiently use what we’re storing?”

At SRJC, a significant portion of that solar energy is stored in a micro-grid on the Santa Rosa campus. Photovoltaic arrays convert solar energy into electricity that gets stored in batteries, a process that is amplified during peak hours of use. The stored electricity supplements regular energy needs and can be used during power outages.

“These projects work together to create that real sustainable energy infrastructure that we need to reach our goals,” Liebman said.

SRJC’s sustainability managers also oversaw the development of the Geothermal Plant Project, composed of 300 geothermal bores that are 400-feet-long and buried beneath Bailey Field. The groundwater, which has a constant temperature that is warmer than the air in the winter and cooler than the air in the summer, is transferred through small pipes to heat or cool Burbank Auditorium, Garcia Hall, and Analy and Forsyth halls.

“Maintaining the heating and cooling systems of 100-year-old buildings is very difficult,” Tillotson said. “We’ve replaced a lot of the [old] systems.”

Additional energy reduction plans include the installation of LED lights on the Santa Rosa and Petaluma campuses, which will save an estimated $300,000 a year and improve lighting quality.

“We’re producing renewable energy at each site,” Liebman said. “We’ve done significant energy efficiency improvements, and each site has a lot more underway.”

SRJC’s new dormitory at the soon-toopen Polly O’ Meara Doyle hall, is tied to the same energy system as the rest of the campus and will be able to optimize current solar power and heat pumps; Liebman also plans to add solar panels that will offset some of the impact.

“One of the challenges with this building was how to maximize keeping rents low while achieving high sustainability,” Liebman said. “It’s just one of those design entities that we’ll have to keep working through.”

Eliminating net nonpotable water consumption

The Greenprint 2.0 calls for using potable water in volumes equal to or less than the amount of rainwater that falls on campus within a year, and non-potable water being used for all irrigation, plumbing and all other non-drinking purposes possible.

One of the larger contributors to this goal is SRJC’s Quinn Central Plant Project, expected to reduce the Santa Rosa campus’ water usage by roughly 20%. Its tank, located near Maggini Hall, holds 50,000 gallons of water, most of which will be used for irrigation, plumbing and cooling towers.

The plant collects water from a natural spring that was discovered in the 1970s, during the initial digging process for the Quinn Swim Center. It’s been long treated as a hazard for basement flooding; for years, SRJC transferred the spring water to the storm drain in a hasty attempt to alleviate the risk.

“It ended up being close to six or seven million gallons of water a year,” Liebman said. “To put that into perspective, the Santa Rosa campus uses about 25 million gallons of water a year — so 25% of all of our water supply, we were just pumping into the storm drain.”

The plant runs on an entirely separate plumbing system to prevent cross-con- tamination with clean drinking water, subsequently limiting its ability to be implemented in newer buildings. “To do more buildings over time, we’ll really phase into them as those buildings go through renovations,” Liebman said. It’s gone through several trials with completion projected for June 2023.

SRJC’s Petaluma campus also uses reclaimed wastewater for irrigation, optimizing its close proximity to a wastewater plant.

“Recycled water is held to a high standard. It would be better to use that water than fresh drinking water, which is really vital and important for people; it isn’t needed to water our lawns or water our plants,” Liebman said.

“One of the challenges with this building was how to maximize keeping rents low while achieving high sustainability,” Liebman said. “It’s just one of those design entities that we’ll have to keep working through.”

SRJC currently diverts 50% of its waste; Tillotson drafted a goal of 80% by 2030 in Greenprint 2.0. “To me, zero waste means doing everything you possibly can, to reduce the amount of waste you produce and then how much you divert,” he said. “So the procedure would be to identify the kinds of waste you’re producing and come up with strategies to reduce it.”

Students and staff driving to campus is the most significant contributor to SRJC’s carbon footprint. While its “commmuter school” status makes this a challenging number to fix, SRJC’s sustainability team is working with the City of Santa Rosa on solutions.

Reducing and diverting campus waste

Tillotson noted a significant decrease in campus landfill waste during his time at SRJC, after the Sustainability Committee advocated for a designated person to focus full-time on waste management and raise awareness about excessive waste on campus.

“I set up a bunch of systems to increase the number of bins and to talk to people,” he said. “The garbage started going down, and the recycling started going up; it was great.”

Tillotson is currently working to pass a single-use plastics resolution, wherein departments would no longer be able use single-use plastics for items such as utensils, bags and food containers.

“You can’t walk into every classroom and talk to every student,” Tillotson said. “Passing laws and passing resolutions to eliminate waste is a lot better than just going around saying, ‘Hey, thanks for using a travel mug.’”

He’s also responsible for so-called “waste installations” seen throughout campus, which highlight common sources of waste from students– primarily coffee cups and plastic water bottles, casually arranged across a lawn. “The district culture allows for that kind of expression,” Tillotson said.

The installations began to appear around 2017 and gradually grew to occu-