Greening the Campus from a Procurement Perspective
by Kevin Lyons
Twenty-Second Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures
October 2002, Northampton, Massachusetts
Edited by Hildegarde Hannum
©Copyright 2002, 2004 by the E. F. Schumacher Society and Kevin Lyons
May be purchased in pamphlet form from the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug
End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230 USA, (413) 528-1737, www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications.html.
You can listen to this lecture online at Archive.org
Introduction by Kirkpatrick Sale, author, and member of the Board of Directors
of the E. F. Schumacher Society
I would venture to say that almost every one of you here has spent some time
in college, and most of you, like perpetual undergraduates, are working in colleges
and universities even still. All in the cause, of course, of what is called
education, appropriately defined by John Maynard Keynes as “the inculcation
of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent,” as true
now, I am sure—or perhaps truer—as when he said it fifty years ago.
At least that’s the kind of education that our institutions have largely
been designed for and competently carry out.
But that design, as we increasingly realize and as David Orr pointed out this
morning, is flawed. Flawed in many ways, from the kinds of students to the things
being taught, from the places and methods of teaching to the purposes of learning
these things, from the kinds of research being carried out to the kinds of graduates
being turned out.
Fritz Schumacher thought a good deal about education and its purposes. In Small
Is Beautiful he speaks of education as “the greatest resource”—meaning
not that it is, but it could be. And it is not education so that we know how
to do things, such as pursue a career: “the task of education,” he
wrote, “would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value,
of what to do with our lives . . . . At present, there can be little doubt that
the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific
and technological know-how but because we tend to use it destructively, without
wisdom. More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom.”
And, he went on, “the essence of education” is not only the transmission
of values but a way of making them “become our own, a part, so to say,
of our mental makeup. This means that they are more than mere formulae or dogmatic
assertions: that we think and feel with them, that they are the very instruments
through which we look at, interpret, and experience the world.”
Now that, I suggest, is the essence of what we are talking about today, values
that we take into our system and through which we see the world. What greening
the campus is all about is acquiring the right values, making them a part of
our worldview, trying to see that those values are enacted in every aspect of
our life—including, as most universities forget, in the daily processes
of running a large institution—and having universities not only teach but
act in ways that reflect the right values of an ecological culture.
The man I am about to introduce to you has worked at that exact task for most
of his adult career. He knows well the sort of values a modern university ought
to have, and even more, at least in his specialties, he knows how it ought to
carry them out. As director of procurement at Rutgers—that is, I should
tell you, not procurement for its football team, which god knows could use some
help—he has since 1988 worked on numerous projects and proposals that have
transformed the way the university does its daily business, from lighting and
energy management to waste recycling and contract packaging return.
You can read the basics of his biography in the lecture handout, but I should
add to it that he has recently completed his doctorate in environmental management
and operations at the University of Sunderland, and we are the first audience
to hear Dr. Lyons. If you really want to know who he is and what he has done,
I suggest you look at his recent book, Buying for the Future: Contract Management
and the Environmental Challenge, which might have had the subtitle, à
la Schumacher, “Purchasing as if People Mattered.” It is an excellent
telling of the Rutgers story, but it is more: it is a guide for any institution
or business that wants to take seriously the idea of living appropriately on
an imperiled earth—and of educating its members in the values inherent
therein.
Please welcome Kevin Lyons.
* * * *
I’m happy to be here today, surrounded by a number of good friends. Some
of you I’ve seen at other conferences around the country. I’m glad
that there is a strong New Jersey presence, including students from Lawrenceville
Prep, who are here in force, and Drs. David and Joan Ehrenfeld from Rutgers
University.
Today I would like to talk mainly about the good things that have been accomplished
at Rutgers in the areas of green contracting and social responsibility. An important
part of the story, however, is the bad things, such as strong resistance on
the part of the administration and contractors. I’ll include that as well.
I have been involved in green contracting for the past fourteen years; in the
beginning I seemed always to be speaking to the same crowd, people who had already
taken action or wanted to. But five or six years ago I started speaking to business
leaders and policymakers, who really need to hear this story and to take action.
These are the people we must concentrate on, but they tend to be set in their
ways and to resist change. They know what works for them, and to make a drastic
change in policy and procedures seems to them like too much work. This presents
a challenge for us who are working to bring about change.
I’m going to present practical steps that you can carry out and practice
every day. It’s not just about green purchasing and improving contracts.
Yes, you need to understand economics—supply and demand, how business works—but
you also have to consider the ethical implications: where do the products come
from? What impact are they having on the university? Are we buying local? Are
we engaging the local community in our struggle to bring change?
You also need an understanding of science and technology to keep up with the
ever-changing products being brought into the institution and to predict whether
or not those particular products are going to satisfy the existing needs of
the institution on a daily basis. It sets you back a couple of paces in achieving
your goals if you purchase an environmentally preferable product, only to learn
that it doesn’t work.
You need to understand policy and how the institution runs, who makes the decisions
and who actually carries those decisions out. Risk assessment also comes into
play, and some of the biggest changes I have made together with my procurement
team have dealt with the health of our faculty, staff, and students, particularly
those of our staff who perform the operational cleaning and maintenance of our
facilities. We have made substantial changes that have affected them in a positive
way.
We must take all these factors into account when we consider environmentally
preferable products instead of the normal everyday purchases based on the attitude
of “We bought it last year, let’s buy it again this year because it’s
the easiest thing to do.” The people you’re going to try to convince
will be struggling with decision-making every day; it’s up to us to help
them understand what’s involved and, once we’ve succeeded, to help
them through the transition of buying alternative products instead of virgin
material.
It is very important in the “trying to convince” stage to be familiar
with the past practices that have made the institution what it is and also to
know the audience you’re dealing with, which includes not only faculty,
staff, and students but the local community, which must be brought into the
fold as well.
I think the biggest obstacle to bringing about change is the administration,
which for the most part will try to wait it out until the spring semester ends
in the hope that by the time you return in the fall you will have forgotten
what you were talking about in the spring. That’s the kind of mentality
we’ve been dealing with for many years. It’s a challenge to persevere
from one academic year to the next with the same message and drive it home until
it is accepted. Then of course, if we’re going to be agitating and talking
about the need for change, we ourselves must set an example by practicing what
we preach. So there’s a lot for you to think about.
I’m going to tell you a story that illustrates the kind of reward that
can result from your efforts. About a year and a half ago Governor Pataki signed
an executive order to green all of procurement for the New York City Transit
Authority. I worked with the Authority on how to implement its green policy.
Initially the purchasing agents said they didn’t want to do it. Too much
work. I was finally able to convince the facilities-maintenance folks to maintain
their elevators with a vegetable-based oil instead of the virgin oil they had
been using. Six months ago one of the seals in an elevator shaft cracked, which
actually happens quite often, and all the oil from that shaft leaked to the
bottom of the pit. There was approximately a foot-and-a-half of it. Now, if
that had happened before the change was made, the spill would have caused a
major hazard requiring a massive clean-up. But with bio-based vegetable oil
all that was required was a minor cleanup, with no worry whatsoever for the
Transit Authority. So now the people there are converts. For the past year we
have been working with them item by item, looking at their purchases. We’re
checking into alternatively fueled buses for the entire fleet. If all goes well,
this will happen within the next few years.
A sidelight of this story is that the students I worked with on this project
were the same students I enlisted from a housing complex at Rutgers. Students
have unusual ways of entertaining themselves in down time. These particular
students chose a dangerous sport called elevator racing. Students in the housing
complex actually open up the trap doors of elevators, climb up onto the top
when there are two elevators side by side and race up and down the elevator
shaft. I was able to convince these students to put their energy into positive
action and help us investigate a soy-based oil initiative for the Transit Authority.
So this group of students has been converted to the side of the environment,
and now they’re working on several of our projects for us.
Before I tell you how change was brought about at Rutgers, I want to give you
a little background about myself. I’ve been involved in environmental action
since I was in elementary school, back when pollution and litter were the concerns
of the day. I would go home and harass my parents to change their ways. Taking
my environmental concern along with me, I went on to harass the military, which
is not a good idea in your first year of military service. I was in procurement,
and my job was to purchase commodities and vehicles and the like. My very first
assignment was to eliminate the gophers on the polo field because the officers
were concerned that the gopher holes would trip their horses. The order came
down to buy chemicals and “Wipe ‘em out. Just get them out of there.”
I objected and said we were not going to buy chemicals to wipe out anything.
Here I was, a lowly soldier opposing the base commander; it was a duel to remember.
For two weeks the orders kept coming, and I kept saying, “I’m not
going to do it.” Reprimands were now being issued against me.
My solution was to come up with an alternative. The entomology department, which
was responsible for pest management on the base, was idle at that time. It was
1980, and there were no wars going on. My plan of action was to purchase straws,
which were used to blow darts to anaesthetize the gophers after we smoked them
out. We moved them to another area of the base and then repaired the polo field.
I was able to convince the base commander that the gophers would never come
back and the officers could safely play polo. We would not have to eliminate
an entire species of gophers, and everybody would be happy. Now, if that hadn’t
worked, I probably wouldn’t be standing here today talking to you. I was
only one step away from being thrown out of the military, but I lasted for six
years, making other significant changes in the way purchases were made in the
military, and I actually won several commendation medals for environmental preservation.
From the military I went to New Jersey, where I worked for two years at St.
Peter’s, a Catholic hospital. I thought my troubles in the military were
bad until I encountered Sister Marie, the president of the hospital, who didn’t
understand the environmental movement in the slightest. She didn’t want
anything to do with it. Her words to me were, “Leave it alone! Just leave
it alone! We don’t need to worry about autoclaving processes and incinerating
our waste and things of that nature. Just go back to your office.” The
turning point finally came when I gave a lecture to Sister Marie and the other
nuns in the administration. On that occasion I was able to convince them to
change some of the products they were purchasing, at least to give it a try.
Sister Marie kept an eye on me for the next two years, but I think we gradually
developed a pretty good relationship.
For most of my fourteen years at Rutgers I have been making changes that I’ll
tell you about today. I know purchasing very well, and I’ve gotten accolades
for the way I execute it, but after seven years of struggling to convince the
administration to incorporate environmental sustainability into its purchasing
policy, I was transferred to the Rutgers Camden campus because “there are
bigger and better things down there for you to do, and our staff meetings are
getting a little too volatile.” In other words, I was being exiled!
I spent five years on the Camden campus. The city of Camden has a lot of difficult
social and community issues to deal with on a daily basis. The state of New
Jersey at that time was taking over the city financially, and luckily for me
one of my first assignments was to rewrite the purchasing regulations of this
depressed city to bring them into accordance with the law. When an environmentalist
is given that assignment, it’s only natural that the result will be a little
bit more than was asked for. The purchasing regulations I wrote contained much
more—in the way of sustainability issues and community-development issues
as well as the requirement to buy locally whenever possible.
When the members of the City Council looked at the regulations I handed them,
their vehement response was, “That’s not what we asked you to do!”
So I picked up my regulations and started to walk out of the room, saying, “Well,
that’s it. I’m not being paid for this; I’ve been working pro
bono for the past year. So I’ll take my regulations and go back to my campus.
Someone said, “Can’t you give us a stripped-down version? Take out
all the...” “No,” I interrupted, “you either get the whole
package, or you get nothing at all.” They were obviously in dire straits
because I had purposely delayed delivering my report till three days prior to
when the Council had to announce that the new regulations were in place. It
was me against the city of Trenton, which is the capital of New Jersey, and
the city of Camden. Two days passed. The deadline for the governor and city
officials to present the government regulations had arrived. To make a long
story short, the policies I wrote were adopted and fully enforced, with the
sustainability issues intact. I think the city is the better for it. The new
guidelines will help to make Camden the great city it once was.
To bring about environmental change there has to be a mixture of professionalism
and activism. You have to know the business side of your organization, and you
also have to agitate. The action part is what really changes minds and moves
people to do some of the things I’ll be telling you about. In addition,
a sense of social responsibility needs to be incorporated into the mix. Then
your co-workers will believe that you not only work eighty hours a week and
are on top of your assignments but you also know how to make your institution
or organization run smoothly.
Green purchasing is more than just buying recycled-content paper. It also means
looking at long-range planning in terms of which products and services you’ll
be bringing into the institution. It has to do with life-cycle approaches. How
are products made? Where do they come from? What resources do they use? How
does the extraction of those resources affect the community in which they are
located? How is the product packaged? How is it shipped? How is it used at the
institution? How is the product ultimately disposed of? Are the resources re-introduced
into the manufacturing process?
This larger picture is often difficult for the average purchasing or business
professionals to grasp. What I’ve been able to do is show them that it
is something they are already doing on a daily basis. Even without thinking
in terms of the environmentally preferable product, they have to consider the
same questions. They ask how long a product is going to last, how much money
it is going to cost, and ultimately what to do when a particular product fails.
So the idea is simply to transfer the same questions that they are dealing with
anyway to the environmentally preferable alternative.
Part of my work involves traveling, not only throughout the United States but
also to South America and the Far East, to see where products we purchase come
from and—if I find unacceptable working conditions in sweatshops or in
coffee production, for example—to look for alternatives. I bring this information
back to the administration as well as to students and faculty so that they understand
how great an impact what we do here has on communities outside of the university.
You need to incorporate this kind of investigation into your work. Now, I don’t
expect every purchasing agent to travel the globe to investigate the source
of products. Fortunately, a lot of information has been published in this area
for purchasing professionals to draw on. It tells about the life cycle of products,
where they come from, the impact they have on the institution—not only
financially but environmentally—and the resources used to get specific
products to the institution. If you’re interested, I can refer you to that
information later.
You will need to consider policy design, interpret that policy, and then implement
it. The important thing is to translate it into action. All of our institutions
should have on the books environmental policies with teeth. Many schools do
now have such policies that are heading them in the right direction. But how
do you sustain the actions that you’re implementing at the university?
You’re going to be a student there for only four years, and then you’ll
move on; so when I work with student interns, I impress on them that whatever
actions are taken have to last beyond their tenure as students. It’s important
to implement good ideas, but you also have to improve upon them with ongoing
innovation and research, upgrading them periodically.
Remember that it’s important to involve your community. Local people can
have a lot to contribute, and they have a lot of energy. In most cases the local
community will go along with what you are doing.
Rutgers University spends about $350 million a year on goods and services; collectively
the higher-education institutions in the United States spend about $200 billion,
which is close to what the federal government spends on goods and services every
year. The University has 48,000 students, more than 9,000 faculty and staff,
and it occupies over 850 buildings. There’s an energy bill every year of
about $25 million, and we spend approximately $3.3 million a year on waste management—with
6200 tons of waste that go to landfill and 5700 tons of waste that are recycled.
The state of New Jersey requires that 65% of waste be recycled. The University
has been hovering at 50-55%, but apparently that’s good enough for the
state to leave us alone. Earlier, several fines were levied against Rutgers
for not meeting the recycling standards. Rather than deal with the problem,
the facilities-maintenance division set up a budget just to pay the fines—
an interesting way out of finding a solution. But eventually we made progress
in reducing energy output, waste, and procurement costs—culminating in
savings, by design alone, of 3.2% annually. With a $350 million budget, that
comes to a hefty $11,200,000.
Rutgers is a state institution, which means that public laws apply to us. Those
of you from New Jersey should be familiar with Executive Order 34, which deals
with the recycling action plan; Executive Order 91, which deals with environmentally
preferable purchases and the guidelines that need to be followed; and the 1987
Resource and Recovery Act, which initiated mandatory recycling in New Jersey.
This Act was passed six weeks before school started. How could we possibly set
up a full-fledged recycling program for a university the size of Rutgers in
six weeks? That’s when I began looking at what actually was coming in to
the institution and enlisting students to help me investigate the trash itself
by doing weekly waste audits, looking at the types of things that the University
was buying and tracing them back to the contracts that brought waste to the
university in the first place.
I think the fact that I was spending most of the day poking through dumpsters
instead of sitting at my desk writing contracts is what gave me the reputation
of being a bit strange. In any case, employees in housing and facilities maintenance
as well as everyone in operations worked together and actually managed to get
the program going in time. Some of the same people who started up that program
fourteen years ago are now working on the next stage of how to deal with waste
at the University.
That was when I began rewriting or negotiating contracts to make them environmentally
sound. They now provide for getting waste back to the manufacturers, to the
place where the product actually originated. If you look at a Rutgers University
contract, you will see that it includes an environmentally preferable alternative,
requires social responsibility on the part of the contracting company, and in
most cases stipulates that waste be returned to the place where we bought it
or to a third party involved in collecting the waste resulting from that purchase.
It also deals with health concerns of our workers who come in direct contact
with the products themselves. As a result, our janitorial staff uses only bio-based
cleaning materials. Before this change was put into place, we asked the janitors
for their input on the health risks they had been concerned about. We sent them
information and explained why we were making the change. Once they understood
that we were doing this not only for improving institutional operations but
to protect their health and improve their job performance, I think it made for
a better work force.
At that early stage we empowered the janitorial staff to monitor who was recycling
and who was not in the various offices and laboratories. The Whoops! program
was initiated, which almost led to my being whoopsed out of the University.
We gave the janitors bright orange fluorescent stickers, and when they collected
the day’s trash, if they found recyclable material that hadn’t been
put in the recycling bin or nonrecyclable material that had, they were to put
Whoops! stickers on the container and not empty it. The idea was to encourage
the janitorial staff to become more involved in recycling, but what happened
was that they issued the stickers to faculty they didn’t like. After two
weeks of trash and recycling not being picked up, we were able to convince them
to limit stickers to those who were not recycling. That program lasted for three
or four months until people started to understand that we were indeed serious
about the categories of waste exiting the institution.
Now our environmentally preferable purchasing is incorporated into the standards
and specifications. There’s a good deal of life-cycle assessment involved
in the specifications we write. The companies we negotiate contracts with have
to provide us with life-cycle cost analysis of the products we want to purchase.
Initially they were reluctant to provide the kind of information we were asking
for: how long a particular product would last, how much it would cost to replace,
what its composition is, what impact it will have—but we prevailed. You’ll
see this kind of language in all the contracts we issue, so in a sense what
I’m doing is getting our contractors more involved in the purchasing process.
They are also required to provide us with detailed and up-to-the-minute reports
on the changing market; and if there are any other alternative products out
there in the field, they need to tell us before we tell them. We have had success
with most of the contractors we deal with. They want to do business with the
University, so they adjust to our insistence on environmentally preferable alternatives.
I can tell you this: because of the amount of money involved, the type of contract
we write has not been a problem. Our contractors have been forthcoming and have
given us the information we require, with the result that significant changes
have been brought about at the University.
The construction of new buildings is a part of our program as well. When buildings
are being designed, environmentally preferable alternatives are incorporated
into the contract specifications, even at the capital construction level. Rutgers
has always had its own staff of engineers and architects; the newly hired head
architect contacted me and asked if I would be interested in rewriting the standards
and specifications of the University to make them more sustainable. At first
I thought it was a crank call! She is spearheading the capital planning and
master plan of the University, and the specifications and standards are actually
taking shape to be more green.
Now I’d like to mention some ways for you to try to deal with these issues:
Necessity testing. Which products are really needed and in what quantity?
Look at what a university or college or school system buys. Is it actually used?
We say we need it, and we buy it in large quantities, but often at the end of
the school year, it’s still sitting around. If you buy 55 gallons of acetate
to conduct an experiment that’s going to take a couple of days, what are
you going to do with the remaining 45 gallons? There needs to be a central source
of information so that you can find out, before you buy a product, if it is
available elsewhere on campus.
Substitution testing. Can undesirable products or specific ingredients
in products be reduced or substituted? I’ll give as an example a waste-disposal
product we had been using. We substituted trash bags with recycled content that
used little or no petroleum. The tear strength of the bags was exactly the same
as with virgin material. We made this substitution eight years ago when the
price of oil was going up and with it the price of trash bags, but once we started
using the new product, our bag prices stabilized.
In substituting one product for another we neglected to inform the janitorial
staff. Prior to the change, different colors had represented bags of different
sizes. The staff was used to green bags for a 55-gallon capacity, blue bags
and red bags for other capacities. But the new bags were all clear plastic,
regardless of size. This threw our non-English-speaking staff off balance. Nothing
was getting done for a couple of days until we realized that we had made a drastic
change without communicating it to those affected. We hastened to hold educational
meetings and helped the staff to understand the change. We were even able to
persuade the supplier to put green, blue, and red labels on the boxes to indicate
the size of the bags. There was no problem after that. So you have to be careful
not to let a good solution backfire on you.
Stopping procurement of dangerous or problematic products. It baffled
me that the University consistently purchased products that were a health risk
to the people who used them. Changing all of our cleaning products to reduce
that risk brought an additional benefit as well. I was able to negotiate with
our risk-management department a significant reduction in the cost of the University’s
insurance policy. Obviously, lowering the risk to health for the employees who
have direct contact with toxic products is welcomed by insurance companies.
We were able to convey the message that there is a connection between sustainability
and insurance rates.
Buying regionally. Why aren’t we buying products and services from
the local economy? In most cases, we’re told that they are not available
in the size or quantity we need. Within the past three years the University
has begun to take a strong stance in this area. An institution like Rutgers
that participates in large-scale research projects can pass technology on to
local businesses so that they can prepare themselves to provide the types of
products and services the institution needs. That is a major step.
Rutgers approached a firm in Edison, New Jersey, that was making widgets and
gave it the technology to produce plastic with recycled content. Now that firm
is exclusively making containers that the University uses on a regular basis,
and it has become a successful business. This is the kind of model we need to
promote. There are local businesses right within reach of your organization
that are eager to do something similar.
We are now negotiating with several local farmers to deliver produce to the
University—specifically organic produce, which the students have been demanding
for a long time. There is no reason why local farmers should not be supplying
us with the majority of the produce we eat. On one of our campuses there is
a small experimental program appropriately called New Jersey Fresh, and the
students are responding positively. Major changes can also be made in the dining
facilities. You should reach out to the dining staff for their input. They are
concerned about what the students eat. And the students themselves have power
in this area. I don’t think they exercise their power enough.
When you start talking about these issues, the administration of your school
is going to voice concern about fiscal responsibility. So it will be up to you
to demonstrate that going green is fiscally responsible. Most institutions
have a one-year budget on a fiscal or calendar basis. You are given your allotment
for one year, and that’s it. Take the simple example of energy-efficient
light bulbs: the initial cost is more than for regular bulbs, but they not only
burn more efficiently, they also last longer. We did get the energy output we
were looking for, but unfortunately the cost reduction wasn’t realized
within the one-year budget cycle. We were able to convince the institution that
the facilities-maintenance budget needed to be extended to a-year-and-a-half
on a trial basis in order for me to prove that the change was cost effective,
that environmental benefit can be a money-saver. Our costs in the area of energy
output were indeed significantly reduced, and as a result the utilities department
is now in the forefront of looking for more sustainable measures.
An important aspect of what I’m doing is to link the use of green products
to computer technology. We’re starting to retrofit one of our computer
labs with fuel cells and solar cells. Several computer terminals will be placed
strategically to make them more conspicuous so that when people go into the
lab, they’ll gravitate to those that are powered by solar or fuel cells.
We hope to be able to expand this project.
Two-and-a-half years ago I was called up from the depths of Rutgers Camden to
work on a special project. Rutgers had been given funding to upgrade its financial
systems to make them web based. The University purchased Oracle software for
this project, and the consultants hired to help implement it said there needed
to be people working on the project who were a little bit wacky and didn’t
follow the University doctrine, who could think out of the box—to use that
overused phrase. At first no one in the administration could think of such a
person. Then someone remembered “that nut we sent down to Camden five years
ago. He might be interested.” So I was assigned to represent the financial
interests of the University on the project. Now, I have to confess that I don’t
like computers, but I said to myself, “If I’m going to be on this
project, I want to accomplish something worthwhile, not just connect the University
to the worldwide web.” The advent of e-commerce was contributing to the
lack of concern about where things come from and how they are packaged. I wanted
to do something to counter that, which is why I was willing to devote myself
to this particular project.
What I did was write computer code that connects all University purchasing to
the internet—which means connecting it to the world. We now have a system
in place that at the click of a computer key actually tracks all the resources
and waste coming into the institution. It tracks the package that a given product
comes in and the resources it took to assemble that product and provides information
about tonnage. We have a prototype that I think and hope is going to be the
standard for all web-based e-commerce systems. You can easily and quickly prepare
a report that shows the exact amount of waste included in a manufacturer’s
shipment to you, and you can use that report to show where you expect reductions
to be made.
We recently had our very first meeting with one of our manufacturers since the
new tracking system went into effect in July. We’re renegotiating the contract
based on the fact that we can now point out specific categories of waste being
generated by a company and attach a dollar sign to it. This is possible because
I was able to work in a code that gives the current market price of a particular
waste, so I can say to a supplier: “We’ve gotten x number of products
from you valued at this amount and y amount of waste valued at this amount.
Let’s sit down and talk about how we’re either going to pass the cost
of the waste on to you or you’re going to come up with alternatives in
the way you deliver products and services to this institution.” So we finally
have the tools to talk much more intelligently about the impact that products
and services have on institutions. I think that in the next decade or so Oracle
and the other financial companies that want to sell this type of technology
are going to be knocking on your door, if they are not already, and now you’ll
be able to use this computer code to demand improvements from your suppliers.
(By the way, Oracle has given me absolutely no money for this system, yet I’m
sure the company is marketing it and making a lot of money with it.)
Here are six practical steps to guide you so that you can achieve better environmental
procurement and better environmental contracting. If you would like to receive
information that fleshes out these headings, contact me at klyons@camden.rutgers.edu.
1. Define and adopt political goals.
2. Evaluate the status quo.
3. Collect and disseminate information.
4. Set a new course for the administration.
5. Make the connection between what the students demand
and how the institution should be run.
6. Procure and select with environmental goals in mind.
7. Take political action: co-operate, network, and be
involved at regional, national, and European Union/global levels.
In conclusion, I can say that we have been able to bring many changes to the
University. We now recycle twenty-four different commodities in addition to
the traditional bottles, cans, and paper. It’s been a lot of hard work,
but I suspect that if things are easy to do, they are not worth doing. So be
prepared to roll up your sleeves. I hope the students from Lawrenceville Prep
will make the trip to Rutgers and find out about the projects we’ll be
working on in the near future. Other students in the audience, I urge you to
connect with your campus staff. It’s helpful to have a faculty adviser,
and there are many examples of faculty and staff working with students to make
significant changes at the institution. But mentors who are actually in the
field doing the work on a daily basis are the people who will give you the most
enlightenment. Often they don’t quite understand what it is that you want
from them, but they can use the assistance and insight and energy that you provide.
So go forth. I’m available; call me any time. I’ll be more than happy
to come and visit your institution and talk green.
Question & Answer Period
University of Massachusetts students are very interested in persuading the
dining service to do local purchasing of the food they eat. How workable do
you think that is, given the large scale: we have 24,000 students, 5,000 faculty
and staff. I also want to ask about the Oracle system you have developed. Is
it accessible from the Internet? We would like to take a peek to see how you
do the specifications and whether we can steal something and use it for our
purposes.
Your second question is easier to answer: yes, that’s something I can make
available to you.
As for making locally grown food available, that has to be phased in gradually.
You need to focus on a small section of the dining facilities first. Avoid taking
on a bigger chunk than you can handle. There’s no way that a few local
farmers are going to be able to support an institution of that size. At Rutgers
we have six dining facilities and several little eateries, and getting produce
in that quantity from small local farmers is just not feasible. Target just
one dining hall to start with. The best approach is to make a prototype, make
it visible, and really promote it. At the same time, be sure to keep looking
for more farmers in the region so that you can gradually expand the program.
Another thing to do is to approach your dining facilities buyer. There’s
usually a food buyer on staff who specializes in negotiating contracts for food
and who probably knows a lot more than we give credit for. When we made the
switch in a very small targeted model at Rutgers, the food buyer who was involved
actually knew about the local organic farms and co-ops in the region. We were
able to negotiate with him to start on a small scale, and then it was a matter
of going to the various farms in New Jersey, explaining what we were looking
for, and seeing what the possibilities were. The hardest part is to actually
locate organic farmers and make sure they meet the new federal standards for
organically grown produce. I’m not sure how many organic growers are in
your area, but I would target one and start from there.
At Rensselaer we’ve been trying for years to provide local foods. I
don’t know how it is at the University of Massachusetts, but we found that
one of the major obstacles was that our dining services are handled by one or
another multinational corporation, such as Sodexho Marriott, the French giant,
or Aramark. That makes it exceedingly difficult to bring about a change because
they have their own contractors. If you go to your university administration
and say, “We’d like to do this,” the answer is “No, it’s
Sodexho Marriott’s business.” If you go to Sodexho Marriott and say,
“We’d like to do this,” the answer is “No, it’s contracted;
we don’t have any autonomy at this university. Big Mother corporation tells
us where to buy.” Even if you then get down to the local produce suppliers
and try to make sure they are buying from local or regional organic farmers,
it’s very difficult to track what actually makes it into your dining halls.
My advice would be to get the big corporations off your campus as soon as possible
and go back to doing it the way you used to.
At Rensselaer we used to handle our own dining services. The staff were university
employees. For some reason—it happened before my time, so I don’t
know why—it was seen as easier to have a giant corporation come in and
provide the service. I’d be interested in actually comparing the cost.
My guess is it was probably cheaper when we did it ourselves than it is to have
Sodexho Marriott do it. Am I right that at Rutgers you do it yourselves?
Yes, we do. I should have mentioned that you need to know whether your dining
facility is run by your own staff or by a private firm. If it’s the latter,
when you request local produce, you’re told, “But that wasn’t
written into the contract; if you want to make a change, you’ll have to
renegotiate the contract,” and then of course the cost will go up.
By the way, the real reason behind that change to private companies was basically
to deflate the unions on campus, which were making too much noise, and replace
them with non-union shops. In addition, it’s a convenience for the administration
to sign one contract and not have to worry about food services.
At Clarkson University Aramark underbid other companies to provide food
services, and that’s what the University went with. There were many complaints
about the quality of the food. What I did was to move off campus and withdraw
from the meal plan.
That’s an important point. I think students have more power than they give
themselves credit for. Can you imagine everybody saying, “We never had
a role in choosing who would run food services, and we’re not going to
eat this food; we’re going to eat off campus where we can get the kind
of food we want.” I’m not sure what would happen, because the University
still has to pay for the contract. I don’t know what kind of renegotiations
would occur at that point, but I can tell you that the university is not going
to stay with a massive contract like that and pay on it every month if nobody’s
using the facility. If students get together for the sake of a cause, they can
bring about change. Of course, the problem is that it’s difficult to get
the critical mass to go along with a revolt like that. Students say they don’t
have time, they’re just too busy, but I think it’s also the reflection
of a pervasive tendency in our society to just adapt to the way things are and
say we have no choice.
We were trailblazers at Rensselaer when it came to green purchasing. We
had a full-time student on a grant who devoted his time to it. We unfortunately
did not make the sort of progress we hoped to. We have a decentralized system
as opposed to what I think is a centralized system at Rutgers, so it’s
even harder when you’ve got 85 different academic and administrative units
with significant purchasing autonomy. And it’s gotten worse because many
people like me are walking around with individual purchasing cards in our pockets:
I’ve got my own little VISA card with a certain limit, and I can go out
and buy what I need to do my job. It’s getting harder and harder to go
green with that kind of purchasing, so I hope you have some advice for us about
that.
I think this is a case of an administration that has put its own financial needs
first. They’ve taken advantage of the fact that people want to get things
done in a hurry, so those credit cards are issued, and the institution’s
problem goes away. We don’t have procurement cards at Rutgers, but it’s
not because of the sustainability issue; it’s more because the administration
doesn’t trust the faculty and staff with procurement cards, for fear there
might be fraud!
Decentralization in this area does present a problem. The advent of the Internet
makes it even more difficult because now you can pay for things with your procurement
card on-line, which takes business away from the local people. All I can suggest
is to promote more vigorously the businesses surrounding the institution that
offer some of the goods and services the university buys and hope that they
will offer discounts for their products. Faculty and staff also need to be encouraged
to utilize those local businesses.
The policies of the university need to be re-addressed, and social consciousness
needs to be raised. The purchasing department on a campus that has decentralized
purchasing has a responsibility to take the lead; it needs to be much more pro-active
in going out into the field and negotiating big contracts. The decentralized
method works really well at the University of Pennsylvania, where there is a
powerful purchasing office that negotiates contracts on behalf of the entire
institution. It makes contractors available via the Internet, where you can
shop on-line, and when you go to these particular companies, you find Penn’s
specific pricing. There are 126 of these Internet-based companies. The purchasing
office did a lot of research to find out who was buying what on campus, going
out aggressively and negotiating with the companies, with the result that they
are now web enabled and web based. Twenty-six of them are actually handling
51% of the institution’s business.
I know you’re with a state-owned school. I work in an independent school,
and it seems to me that the basis of much of the change we’re trying to
bring about has to come from giving students an incentive to actually participate
in making it happen. Do you know of any schools that have worked out a way of
using federal grants for hiring students to participate in the kind of work
you’re doing, and can you shed any light on that process?
Yes. We’ve gotten a lot of our funding to work with students from the Environmental
Protection Agency. The most recent grant I was able to get was from the EPA
and the Department of Energy for a project being partnered by Rutgers Camden
campus and the Camden Science and Technology High School right off campus. It
has to do with buying green chemicals, converting the science labs and such
to buying green instead of the traditional chemicals. This project has been
underway for about a year now.
The Department of Agriculture has also provided us with significant funding
for student internships. We made a seven-minute, consciousness-raising video
on waste management. If any of you would like a copy of it, let me know. It
was distributed to the faculty, staff, and students on the Camden campus. In
addition to federal funding, Waste Management also contributed $5000 for the
video.
Some of the contracts I’ve written require the contracting company to pay
for internships or contribute to a project. In fact, most of the money for internships
has come from the companies that do business with the university. And the savings
we’ve been able to make as a result of our projects have gone back into
the internships. This makes some projects and initiatives self-funding. We had
been spending $4 million a year on waste management, and we were able to reduce
that by $1 million. Of course, a lot of those savings went back to facilities,
but we were able to negotiate some of it for funding several students to work
on more projects.
At what point in the transition to providing locally grown food did the
students become involved in what you were doing? Did they at any point generate
the critical momentum necessary to make the transition, or was it for the most
part a decision that they were receptive to?
It was a combination of both. The University implemented its environmental policy
in 1992. Part of that implementation process was a committee I chaired that
consisted of faculty, staff, and students. Students at that time wanted to see
a dramatic change in the way the dining services operated. One of the line items
in the policy dealt with food. We all took a particular policy to work on, with
the goal that it be implemented by the University. The students gravitated toward
the food issue, and they were indeed able to incorporate their demands. They
assumed ownership in this case: they sent out flyers; they did the surveys necessary
to find out if this was something the student body really wanted; they put together
a well documented package with a good cost analysis. I took care of the negotiations
with the contractors, dining services took care of the advertising and the marketing.
We started out with a small prototype that takes up very little space in one
of our many dining facilities.
Now we’re working on the next phase, which will require going back to the
farmers and renegotiating contracts. These will be the same farmers who are now
taking the University’s food waste, which goes for feed. So there’s
a connection here; it’s not a matter of our finding people. We’ve been
recycling our food wastes with these various farmers in and around New Jersey
for the past twelve years. We’re actually paying them to take our food waste.
We’re going to say to these same farmers, “Now we want to buy organically
grown produce from you,” thus expanding the program by completing the loop.
Kevin Lyons was head of the Procurement Team for Rutgers University Integrated
Administration Systems Project, a multi-year initiative to improve the university’s
efficiency and effectiveness while incorporating environmental values. He conducts
research on and develops Environmental Contract Management (ECM) policy and programs
and lectures widely on the topic throughout the United States and United Kingdom.
He has also worked with the U.K. Government and the World Wildlife Fund-U.K. on
implementing the Best Value/Local Agenda 21 Purchasing System throughout the UK
Mr. Lyons is the recipient of the National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation
Achievement Award and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Annual
State Recycling Award.
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