President Emmert 
Office Hours: Environment

Few issues today have gathered more attention, both here in the United 
States and around the world, than climate change and global warming. At 
the University of Washington, of course, we’ve been leaders in the 
research and teaching on these issues for decades now. But as a university, 
like most of our institutions around the country, we have an obligation to 
do more than just the research and the teaching. We also need to find ways 
to lead by example. How we run our institution, how we deploy our 
resources, how we make good use of all those things that area available to 
us is critically important, so that we are good stewards of this planet, as 
well as good students of it. 

So, here we are today, for this issue of Office Hours, inside Merrill Hall, 
which is the home of the UW’s botanical gardens. It’s a building that 
we’re very proud of for many reasons, not the least of which is it was our 
first truly green building. This building was rebuilt after a horrific fire that 
was caused by arsons, as many of you remember, and it’s been turned into 
not just a great facility for the work that goes on here at the botanical 
gardens, but also as a building that exemplifies what it is to be green, what 
it is to be engaged, what it is to be addressing issues of climate change and 
global warming.

That commitment is why I’ve joined with 150 other university presidents 
to make sure that our campuses are exemplars of how big organizations 
can demonstrate sustainability and the best practices for reducing our 
impact on the environment and having a positive impact on global climate 
change, rather than a negative one. 

Let me tell you a little bit more about Merrill Hall. Not only was Merrill 
Hall the first green building that the university built; it was in fact the first 
LEED certified building in all of Seattle. And now that Governor Gregoire 
has mandated that all state buildings that are built will be LEED certified, 
this means that Merrill Hall was the first of just many buildings that will 
be as energy efficient and as soft on the environment as this wonderful one 
is.

Merrill Hall has a number of sustainable features that make it a model for 
green buildings. Storm water recycling used to water a green roof garden; 
natural ventilation using windows and fans to circulate air; solar panels 
that generate enough electricity to power the whole main floor, and 
recycled building products, such as bamboo flooring, recycled concrete, 
and furniture crafted from salvaged urban trees. And Merrill is one of four 
UW buildings on the Seattle campus that have been certified. The recently 
completed Benjamin Hall Interdisciplinary Research Building received the 
Building Council’s LEED gold award. And five historic warehouse 
buildings on the Tacoma campus that were renovated for classroom and 
office space have also received a landmark LEED certification. And the 
Bothell campus, located with the Cascadia Community College, has an 
extensive storm water system that separates pollutants, power 
conservation measures in place, and is pesticide free. Plus, an interpretive 
center for public visitors to the 58 acre wetlands, located to the east side of 
the Bothell campus, is now in the planning stage.

So, what does it mean when an organization like the University of 
Washington says that it’s going to take sustainability seriously? Well, first 
of all, we have to recognize that this is an enormous challenge. We’re 
doing many things today, and we’ve very pleased and proud of the 
progress we’re making. But there’s much, much more to be done, and 
some of it’s going to be hard, and we have to recognize that. Some of it is 
also going to entail difficult choices that we’ll have to make, in the way 
we behave, the way we use our campus, and the way we interact with the 
environment around us. We’ve started a number of programs already at 
the university, and I want to talk about those for a minute, and then about 
what else we need to do.

In the summer of 2004, we created the Environmental Sustainability and 
Stewardship Committee, that’s now headed by Dean Sandy Archibald of 
the Evans School. This committee that includes faculty and staff and 
students is looking at all of the systems of the university in its entirety. 
They’re looking, for example, at the way we purchase and utilize energy, 
and how we might conserve it better. They’re looking at the way we 
process and handle waste products. They’re looking at how we do 
construction processes, and ways in which we can improve upon that, to 
minimize its impact on the environment. And they’re looking at the uses 
of chemicals and cleaning products, and a variety of other applications on 
campus, to make sure that we’re doing all that we can to minimize those.

In addition, we’ve been active partners in the Puget Sound Partnership, an 
effort that was started by Governor Gregiore, that included leadership 
from all over the Puget Sound region. I was fortunate enough to serve on 
that committee, and continue to work with them, to find ways in which 
we, the university, can help focus our efforts on maintaining the quality of 
the Puget Sound region, and especially the waters of Puget Sound. When 
we ride a ferry across the Sound, it certainly looks beautiful and lovely, 
but underneath, there’s some great problems, and we need to act quickly 
before it has irreparable harm. In the Seattle community, the university is 
already demonstrating great leadership in transportation issues. More than 
75% of the people coming to the university come in something other than 
a single occupancy vehicle, whether it’s carpooling or riding the bus, or 
bikes, or even walking; our people are really showing the way to minimize 
the impact through transportation. Similarly, we’ve also joined with 
Mayor Nickels, and Ron Sims, our county executive, in providing some 
really great strengths around the Seattle Climate Partnership. Mayor 
Nickels, as you know, has been going all around the country, promoting 
the need for urban communities to sign on to the Kyoto Protocols, that 
even if the nation is still weighing whether or not it should be a part of 
that, the cities need to act, and we’re joining in that effort.

And of course, many people are doing wonderful things across all of our 
campuses. Let me give you a few examples. Our solid waste recycling 
teams have in fact had a huge impact on the reduction of the waste streams 
that we have to deal with, and thereby saving us $400,000 a year simply 
by focusing on recycling efforts and getting all of us to participate. 
Similarly, our facilities services folks, simply by encouraging all of us to 
turn out our lights, have managed to reduce our energy consumptions by 
$1 million a year each year, for four years.

And our folks in the motor pool have done a wonderful job receiving a 5 
star rating and an Eco-Star Award for their work to reduce fuel 
consumption. They’ve added new, alternative-fuel vehicles, hybrid 
vehicles, and very low fuel consumption alternatives to what we had 
before. Down in the Medical Center, we’ve also had some great success, 
with them earning a Governor’s Pollution Prevention Award, for the way 
they handle all of their waste materials down in that facility.

We all ask ourselves, what can we as individuals do to help in this effort? 
Well, of course, there’s many things that are pretty self-evident, but we 
simply need to do them. We need to be attentive to turning out the lights in 
our offices and in our homes. We need to make sure that we shut down our 
computers when we’re not using them, or any other electrical devices. We 
need to make sure that we recycle plastic and paper, as we all know we’re 
supposed to. We need to make sure that we minimize our consumption of 
fuels like hydrocarbons in particular, in the way we use our cars, and take 
advantage of carpooling and public transportation that’s avaiable. And of 
course, we all need to take advantage of the light bulb that we now know 
is the sign of green technology, that is, of course, the compact fluorescent 
light, that has such a huge impact on our consumption of electricity. These 
things, and many, many more, are all that we need to do as a community. 

But let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve started down this road; we’ve made a 
lot of progress at the University of Washington; but we have a long way to 
go. There’s many hard decisions to be made; there’s many things that we 
have to do together; there’s things that we haven’t quite focused on yet 
that we’ve probably overlooked. And my invitation to you, my ask for 
help, is that we not only do all the things we can do as individuals, but that 
you also send your ideas to me through our web page. Make sure that we 
know we’re doing everything that we can as a university community to 
fulfill our commitment to the environment. 

So, I’d like to hear from you on the subject of environmental stewardship. 
I’d like to hear your ideas and your thoughts and your concerns. I hope 
you’ll take a moment to post your thoughts on our message board, at 
washington.edu/president. Thank you very much for your time and 
attention.