From recycling, composting and a community garden to environmentally friendly construction and native plant landscaping, New College is committed to reducing its carbon footprint.
From recycling, composting and a community garden to environmentally friendly construction and native plant landscaping, New College is committed to reducing its carbon footprint. One of the ways we green our campus is through the dedicated Green Fee.
It is a small fee paid by each student, providing about $28,000 each year for sustainable projects on campus. The best part? It’s student-funded, so it’s student-run. Have a good idea to make New College a more sustainable place? Then you can submit a Green Fee proposal and see your idea come to fruition. The Green Fee is administered by the Council for Green Affairs (CGA), a part of New College’s student government. The CGA allocates funds at the beginning of every spring semester.
The CGA meets regularly and is open to any students interested in helping make New College a more sustainable campus. Students work together on a variety of projects such as the community garden and compost system, and coordinate campus events such as Food Security Fair. In spring 2012, the CGA funded the first student projects: a compost overhaul and a bike-sharing program. For more information, contact the student vice president of Green Affairs, Orion Morton, at orion.morton13@ncf.edu.
Our Academic Center was awarded Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification by the U.S. Green Building Council in 2011 for a number of sustainable features:
Five residence halls opened in 2007 also adhere to LEED requirements. They feature flat and gabled roofs and floor-to-ceiling windows in their common areas to make good use of Florida’s abundant year-round sunshine.
The Charles Ringling mansion and its gravity seawall, constructed in 1925-26, weathered tides and storms for 85 years until the seawall was on the verge of collapse. With funding from the State of Florida, the old seawall was replaced in 2012 to restore the aesthetic of the Ringling Historic District but with more modern materials. In addition to the beautiful balustrade along Sarasota Bay, the restoration includes an intertidal lagoon with a sloping shoreline and additional intertidal habitat, providing New College students and K-12 students who visit our campus better access to studying the natural environment.
As part of the Campus Master Plan, New College has removed exotic invasive grasses and replaced them with native Florida ground covers that reduce the expense and carbon footprint of mowing and create a more diverse and natural landscape in the center of campus. Project funding was provided by the New College Foundation thanks to a generous gift from Phyllis Collins.
In 2015, students worked to bring New College into the Post-Landfill Action Network, a consortium of campuses across the country dedicated to work toward reducing the waste they produce. For more information, contact the Zero Waste TA, Allegra Nolan, at allegra.nolan15@ncf.edu.
Students worked throughout the 2015-2016 school year to plant a Food Forest/Carbon Farm on the Caples Campus. It was officially planted on May 20, 2016, with over 50 different species of fruiting trees, edible greens, wildflowers, starch crops and spices. The Food Forest/Carbon Farm represents New College’s commitment to finding innovative solutions to tough issues, as the Food Forest provides food for the campus, provides habitat for wildlife increasing local biodiversity and pollinators, facilitates study in a range of academic disciplines ranging from ecology to anthropology, all while sequestering excess carbon from the atmosphere to help mitigate climate change. Updates on the food forest can be found on its Facebook page.