University of California, San Diego
IN-1: Innovation 1

Green Office Certification Program: UC San Diego’s Sustainability Program Office (SPO) regularly partners with motivated students to promote resource conservation and sustainable practices on campus and in the community. SPO welcomes innovative and original student projects that will help the campus strive towards reaching its Climate Action Plan goals while continuing to lower the anthropogenic impact on the environment. In the summer and fall of 2011, the Green Office Certification (GOC) program was created and designed by two UC San Diego students, Mercedes O’Brien, an Environmental Systems; Environmental Chemistry major and Alexander Rickleifs, a Mechanical Engineering major. The GOC team works with office staff to identify opportunities to implement or improve existing sustainable practices and earn points towards certification. The primary goals of the program are to increase sustainability awareness and promote conservation throughout the campus and the community through a simple and efficient green certification process. The program also helps the University address opportunities to reduce resource consumption, create opportunities for students to gain sustainable knowledge and experience, and help reduce the human impact on the environment. The GOC strives to certify, educate, recognize, and award office buildings and departments on campus by addressing eight categories of resource consumption: energy, waste, printing, kitchen, transportation, purchasing, participation, and innovation. Within each category sustainable practices or credits are assigned points based on their environmental impact. The points are tallied using an Excel based calculator to give a certification level of Certified (40-59 points), Silver (60-79 points), Gold (80-89 points), or the highest level Platinum (90+ points including all building commissioning credits). The Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) building was the pilot certification project; this building received a final certification level of Silver and earned a total of 64 points. The sustainable and energy efficient technology implemented in CSE amounted to a total cost savings of about $44,380 per year.