Mary Fischer:
Thank you, Sharon. Hi everyone. Good evening. It's nice to see you all. Thanks for coming tonight. We are going to be talking through several recent sustainability initiatives at Brandeis this evening and then any other questions you might have? I know many of you submitted questions ahead of time as well, so hopefully I'll be able to answer those with what we're going to be talking about tonight. Let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to talk about most of these recent highlights, but I just wanted to kind of go over them with you in case you weren't aware. I think and this is online as well, an even longer timeline is online, so you can see even more developments that we've had over the past several years. I'm going to be talking about Skyline, our newest residence hall.
Mary Fischer:
We're going to be talking about our EV charging stations, our LED lighting projects. I probably won't be talking about all-compostable catering service since we haven't had catering in quite a while. But we have a Tesla battery storage system. We have a new climate action plan, which is currently under review and we have a new Sustainability Committee. We also have a lot of developments in dining, which I'm going to talk a lot about as well. But first I thought it would be helpful just to know a little bit about my background. I've been the sustainability manager at Brandeis since 2015, and I came there directly from Stonyfield, which is the yogurt company based in New Hampshire. My job title there was actually Carbon Master and one of the main things I did was the literal farm-to-spoon footprints of our yogurt products, but not just for Stonyfield, also for Dannon, which is the sister company at the time.
Mary Fischer:
That was everything from the carbon footprint of the packaging, to the transport, to the fruit mix, to the milk mix, whatever, everything that was in there. So if you have any questions at all about yogurt, I can definitely answer those. But it goes to my training, which was in lifecycle assessment, which is essentially the environmental impact of a thing, whatever that thing might be from its origin to its end. It's life. That's a perspective I have whenever I'm looking at something for sustainability wise at Brandeis and I have a master's from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and I also have experience working with the US Department of Energy and Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. I bring all of that to Brandeis in my work here.
Mary Fischer:
The first thing I want to talk about which is something most people have questions about first is waste diversion. It's the most tangible thing that we think of when we think of sustainability. One of the, I guess, silver linings, if you will, of COVID is that we quickly realized that with our new dining setup and having so much dining be single use items and take out that we would have a waste diversion issue on our hands if we didn't add capacity for our compost. The blue pins on this map are where we had all of our compost areas pre-COVID. We kind of rolled everything out to all of our academic sites and our dining halls for compost. Then we had a plan to do some more trials and residence halls for compost just to see how well students were able to separate between trash, recycling and compost.
Mary Fischer:
When COVID hit, we just said, "Look, we've got to add capacity. Let's just add the compost bins, see how it works." It's actually been working really well. Now every single residence hall and academic building and dining hall, everywhere there's compost bins available. This is, so for example, a picture of our waste station. This is a waste station at East looking up at Skyline. This is a picture of our in office. This is actually in the admissions building, an office kitchen with the waste trash and recycling bin. What's happened here is that we've dramatically increased our diversion rates. In 2015, over 76% of our waste was going to trash and that either goes to landfill out of state or incineration in-state. We only had a 2.4% compost rate.
Mary Fischer:
To our last most recent academic year, we boosted that compost rate to nearly 20% and boosted our recycling rate as well. Now, less than 60% of our waste is going to landfill or incineration, so we've had a really successful rollout of waste diversion on campus, which is fantastic. That's all I'm really going to say about waste. I want to switch to our EV charging stations, which is another program I was able to bring to campus or the expansion of EV charging stations, I should say. We had three. If you remember, there was an emissions scandal with Volkswagen several years ago, and Volkswagen, who had been marketing their diesel vehicles as clean diesel, there was a whistle blower and they were outed and it was made public that they were not in fact clean in any way, shape or form.
Mary Fischer:
The US along with many other countries sued them and part of their settlement was to fund the expansion of EV charging infrastructure. Brandeis was the first in the Northeast to receive some funding from this settlement. We were able to add... I was contacted in 2018 by our EV charging station provider and they said, "Do you want some free EV charging stations? And I said, "Yes, we do. We would really love some free EV charging stations." We added seven stations. We had three, we added seven, so capacity went from six parking spots to 20 parking spots for charging electric vehicles and those added stations are free. What we do is we charge for parking there 20 cents a kilowatt hour, which is way cheaper than you can fill up your car for gas. But we use the money to pay for any kind of repairs. We just had that needed a software update or what inevitably happens during the winter is a plow will somehow break a cord off and we have to replace the cord. We do charge for them, but we also use the money to maintain them.
Mary Fischer:
That's a really great benefit and these parking spots, so this is theater lot looking out into Ziv and these are the first four parking lots that are closest to the building, so you can bet people are super incentivized to get an electric vehicle if they are buying a new vehicle because they, not only get to have an electric vehicle, but then they get to park closest to campus as well, so that's really fun.
Mary Fischer:
Next, I'm going to talk about Skyline. I'm sure all of you have heard about our success with Skyline as our greenest new building. I have some static images and some facts here, but I wanted to share, we have some really cool drone footage of Skyline. I wanted to play that. I know that it can be a little bit choppy on Zoom to watch a video, but it's really short and it's just drone footage, so it's really fun. Sharon, are you seeing that okay? great. Skyline was completed in 2018 and what you can't see here obviously are the Wells that are drilled below the courtyard there and off to the left where that tent is. We had 40 closed loop, 500 foot geothermal wells put in, and I can explain what that means if anyone wants to get technical.
Mary Fischer:
But what it meant is that we're using the Earth's heat, which is essentially a constant 55 degree temperature to either heat the building hotter than that, or cool the building or help pre-cool the building with that. Do, do, do, do go back here. What that meant is that we did not have to hook Skyline up to our central campus steam loop. We have that central heating plant that's fueled by natural gas and oil, and that provides the heat for the vast majority of campus, but because we were able to do geothermal and make the building so energy efficient, we did not have to hook it up to the natural gas central steam loop. If you've read any sustainability related headlines recently, you probably heard about the major push from all sorts of cities and institutions to go more electric, to become more electrified and to stay away from fuels like natural gas and oil.
Mary Fischer:
This is essentially our first step in that process. The reason that we want to be electrified is because electricity is the only fuel capable of being 100% renewable with the technology that we have today. The more electrified things are, the more chance they have to be operated fully by renewable energy. Obviously, we have the geothermal, as I mentioned, we have the solar panels on the ceiling, we have a ton of different... a whole list of energy conservation measures within the building. You've got all led lighting, you've got enhanced installation, all sorts of things, efficient systems inside. The result was that Skyline is 30% more energy efficient than a comparable residence hall that were just built to meet state code and that's a really big deal. That 30% is a big deal in the building world for efficiency, so we're very proud of that. Sharon, I'm getting a notice that my connection's unstable so just let me know if you need me to go back and repeat anything if I cut out, okay?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Okay.
Mary Fischer:
Thanks. Great. That is Skyline. What I also want to say about Skyline is that we essentially approached the building of skyline and the design of skyline with the mentality that we wanted to see how efficient and how sustainable we could make a building given our budget. What ended up happening is that the geothermal system and the additional energy efficiency measures were less than 3% of the total budget of the project, 3%. With that 3% budget, we are saving an enormous amount of energy every year. That hits our budget, that hits our carbon footprint, that's the triple bottom line that we all dream of, so that's been really exciting. What that has done is informed our draft climate action plan and given us a set of guidelines taken from the experience of Skyline to say, "Well, if we have any new building projects on campus, then we're going to need them to be at least 30% more efficient than code." We know we can do that with Skyline so now we're going to hold that standard to the rest of our buildings. We have a new draft building standard that we've been developing and that's part of the work of our Sustainability Committee as well.
Mary Fischer:
All right. I'm going to pause there and ask if there's any questions that we want to address that are relevant before we move on to talk about something other... another energy efficiency project.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Sure. Allen Alter. Alan, if you'd like, feel free to unmute yourself, if you'd like to ask your question, or I'm also happy to read it from the chat.
Allen Alter:
Sure. I'm here now. Hi, everybody. I'm wondering if there's any way of tapping into the deep Wells that have been made for Skyline and to share those with any other buildings.
Mary Fischer:
Unfortunately, no. However, knowing that we have the geology that works for geothermal, we can certainly evaluate geothermal for other building projects. For example, if we were going to do... Gosh, there are so many renovation projects that are being considered, but we could think about, dream is to drill Chapels Field and see what we can get from there and then bring geothermal over to Massel and Rosenthal. Because you only lose kind of like... you restart it. Everything is done. It's totally usable after you drill underneath. But it's good to know that we have the geology for it.
Allen Alter:
These are literally 500 feet deep?
Mary Fischer:
They are.
Allen Alter:
Wow. I proposed another question, which is a broader question. We can wait to the end to get to that about Brandeis and of being a leader in some ways in trying to be greener than anybody else in the area or trying to make the greenest dorm. Well, this is a green dorm in Skyline, but I wonder if there are any other initiatives Brandeis can do to be a leader in green technology as far as universities go.
Mary Fischer:
Let me put that one on hold and we can come back to it, if that's okay?
Allen Alter:
Fair enough.
Mary Fischer:
Great. Thanks for your question.
Sharon Rosenberg:
We have two more questions, Christine Chilingerian.
Christine Chilingerian:
Yes, just wanted to take us back for a minute to compost. I was so excited to hear about all of the improvements in the waste stream. As a student who worked on a project back when there was no environmental major at Brandeis, just the minor and I was working with Professor Laura Golden in her greening the ivory tower class to ask that we do something about all of the waste in the to go containers with catering. We at the time were successful in getting those to be biodegradable, but it's huge improvements since that time, over 10 years ago. I was just curious to hear more about the compost that's created at Brandeis and where does it go? Is it sent to a place where we get kind of a soil share? I know some companies do that. Just curious.
Mary Fischer:
Sure. We partner with Black Earth Compost. They're on the North shore. They're an industrial composter. They do big dirt piles, so the compost comes in and they mix it 60, 40 carbon to nitrogen I think is their ratio. We don't have a soil share, but Brandeis still kind of, we make our own compost from kind of leaf piles and other grounds waste, I guess. That pile is still over... It's kind of by Lemberg Children's Center, so they kind of make their own compost there. But Black Earth, they're fantastic. They're a small company that has grown leaps and bounds. I believe it's the most responsible composter in the area. There are composters who do anaerobic digestion, which is great. We love anaerobic digestion but as far as a composter who can actually compost compostable single use disposable items, Black Earth is the only one I know of in the area. The other ones will kind of literally take that stuff out, put it in the trash before they send it to anaerobic digestion.
Christine Chilingerian:
Thank you.
Mary Fischer:
Thank you.
Sharon Rosenberg:
We have one more question, Laura Cahn.
Laura Cahn:
Hi. I'm all in favor of more energy efficient vehicles, but I want to be cognizant still that electric vehicles are going to end up rusting on a pile somewhere and the tires are going to end up rusted or piled on a tire pile, and the batteries are going to end up somewhere. I hope among all these things we're cognizant of the fact that at the moment, a lot of electricity is still made from fossil fuels and also the same about LED lights and solar panels that they involve techno waste and I hope we're working toward getting even better. I think Brandeis is going in the right direction. It's remarkable, but I don't want to lose sight of the fact that we're still causing problems. Thank you.
Mary Fischer:
No, you're absolutely right and I think it's... from the life cycle perspective of things, right, which I'm trained in, that's absolutely... I think about that all the time. What's going to happen to these solar panels in 25 years when they're making a fraction of the energy they're making today and we want to replace them. I was just talking with the solar installer yesterday actually, we're evaluating solar for two more rooftops on campus, and he told me that they're working with solar panel refurbishers to be able to refurbish panels and take from them what they can and refurbish them for reuse wherever possible, because you're absolutely right. There's a lot of waste and precious metals and minerals that are caught up in these things. Thanks for your comment. I'm going to go ahead and move on because I want to tell you one more energy efficiency project.
Mary Fischer:
One example of another suite of energy efficiency projects that we're doing, which has LED retrofits in buildings. This one was in the Shapiro Campus Center in 2018 and I'll show you the before and after. Again, another type of sustainability project that improves people's lives and also saves energy. Before, this is looking up at the atrium, we had just a ton of track lighting with bulbs that were out and literally just had never been changed when they were out and then after, we have all this beautiful bright lighting for much lower energy use. People would actually stop me in the hallway at the SCC and who worked in the building and say, "Thank you for changing our lighting, it's so much better." But the beauty of it for me, it's not just that, but it's the energy use. This is a graph of daily kilowatt hour usage per day before the retrofit and after. You can see, before, these were the energy use is highest is in the summer months because that's when the building is using more electricity and lowest is during the winter months and during breaks and things.
Mary Fischer:
But what I did is I just looked at the average and you can see the average before and the average after, it's much lower after. I'm always trying to confirm that we're actually making progress by looking at the data. Since we did this project, we did a number of other projects. Usdan, the library, Village, the admin complex and athletics are all slated for LED upgrades as well. Always like to share the good story and the data there. Then our solar. I have another video of our solar. I'll do the same thing. I'll talk through it as I show you, because I just love this drone footage. Let's see if I can get this. This is one of our newer solar installations on the library. This is a power purchase agreement installation and it powers approximately something like a quarter of the library's electricity.
Mary Fischer:
It's one of our bigger installations on campus, but it's just super fun to look at it from a drone footage. It's one of our three. We have, obviously, I showed you the solar overs on the Skyline roof and then the solar on Gosman, which was actually installed by the first sustainability staff member on campus back in, I think, 2008 or so and then Goldfarb. As I mentioned, we're evaluating two more roofs on campus for solar as well. I wanted to lead into this because I get a question pretty often from students, which is, can we have more renewable energy on campus? I know I say yes, but it's pretty limited. I'm going to run through the example that I made for students, because I used to get this question all the time and I just want to run through it because it's actually kind of fun to look at. Students ask me all the time, "Why can't we get wind? Massachusetts is rated highly for wind resource. It's one of the best States for wind resource. Why can't we get wind turbines on campus?" I show them this example, and I use a really small wind turbine.
Mary Fischer:
This is really small in the world of wind turbine. This is an example. This wind turbine right here, which you can see if you're driving into Boston. It's right by that Encore Casino and the wastewater treatment plant. It's right over here on the map. It's a tiny baby wind turbine and it would be about this big on our campus. Brandeis consumes about 40 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year and it's going down by the way. This little baby wind turbine is one and a half megawatts, so if it ran all the time when we needed it, it would make up about 7% of the electricity that we would use in a typical year.
Mary Fischer:
If we wanted all of our electricity and we had a huge battery storage system, we would put... this is where wind turbines we'd have to put them and we wouldn't really be able to have any athletics fields anymore. It would take up our entire campus. And that's If we had a huge battery storage system. If we didn't, we'd have to put even more. We'd have to have two or three times as many wind turbines, if we didn't have a huge battery storage system and we would cease to be a university. We'd be a wind farm.
Mary Fischer:
The next example is for solar. Students ask, "Why don't we have solar on every single rooftop? Why can't we have more solar on every rooftop?" The reality is solar is fantastic, but it doesn't actually produce that much energy. Even if we had solar on every single rooftop, on every inch of rooftop space that we had available, it would still probably only provide in the single digits of electricity that we actually use every year. If we wanted our campus to provide 100% of the solar it needed, we would have to cover every single square inch of surface area. This is a parcel map from the City of Waltham and these orange and yellow areas are the areas of land that Brandeis owns, including the ones that are forested, which of course we don't want to be cutting down to put solar in. We would have to put something like a ground mount solar system and a huge battery storage system to go along with it if we wanted a hundred percent of our electricity all the time to come from solar.
Mary Fischer:
Even if you mix the two, solar and wind, it still doesn't really work. It's a surface area problem in terms of solar. We just are dealing with a physical limitation. We don't have the kind of gobs of land that a Cornell or someone else who has a ton of land can do to make these huge solar fields. But we are, as I said, looking at the rooftops. Anytime we're looking at replacing a roof on campus, we automatically build in, let's also look at solar because the best time to do solar is when you're putting on a new roof. As you know, we have a lot of old roofs at Brandeis, so it's not always a good idea to put new solar on a roof that's 18 years old. That's the strategy there.
Mary Fischer:
I forget what I put next in here. Let's see. Let me pause there because we're going to do a little bit of Sustainability Committee and then we're going to talk about dining. But I'm going to pause there for some more questions. It looks like we have some things in the chat.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Yes. There's a solar panel question from Chris and Mary.
Mary Dateo:
Ah, yes, this is Mary Dateo. I was just asking if there's been any consideration about installing solar panels in the parking lots, because that's done a lot here in California. Maybe I didn't hear you mention it.
Mary Fischer:
No, we came this close to doing solar canopies in the athletics parking lots three or four years ago, and we submitted our application, right? it was just too close to the deadline when the Massachusetts incentives were switching over to the new incentive program. We submitted it by the deadline, but our application was underneath dozens and dozens of others, so they ran out of the money for that instead of... before they got to ours. We had to kind of rethink the approach and in the meantime, we thought about doing canopies for, so theater lot, for example, the biggest lot. But there's a little bit of hesitancy there because we have such a small area for campus, if we took up theater lot with big solar canopies, in the grand scheme of a Brandeis master plan, that's actually developed as another type of use. Nobody was quite ready to kind of bite that off and do solar. But I still hope that we can do the canopies in athletics lot someday. I think it's probably doable.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thanks. There's one other question, it's a dining halls question.
Mary Fischer:
Oh, okay.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Would you like it now or do you want to hold till you do the dining-
Mary Fischer:
Let's hold because I'm going to talk about dining a lot in just a minute, so let's just hold on to that.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Okay.
Mary Fischer:
First, before we get to dining, I do want to talk about our new Sustainability Committee. Brandeis to my knowledge never really had a kind of formal Sustainability Committee. There was the Brandeis Environmental Sustainability Team or BEST, which was something that I think Laura Golden probably started. But I don't know, so if anyone here on the call was at Brandeis at the time of that, let me know and maybe you can answer the question of whether or not it was a kind of formal committee or if it was more of a volunteer thing. But the point is we now have one that is formal and the beauty of a committee at Brandeis is that we make recommendations and then we filter them up to our VP of operations and the president's office as well. They get filtered up so we have to get paid attention to.
Mary Fischer:
We created a Sustainability Committee this past year. Let me just plug in so I don't lose anybody. Go, plug in. Great. We meet monthly and then our subcommittees meet monthly. I just wanted to give you an idea of who we are and then also, what are some of the things we're working on. Our education subcommittee has been very active and successful. We helped get a new minor approved, so there will be a new minor in climate justice science and policy that will come, I want to say maybe next fall or I think next fall, I think. We helped get that approved. We are planning on doing faculty workshops for faculty in all types of different disciplines on how to incorporate climate change into your curriculum, whether you're a literature teacher, economics teachers, sociology, health profession. Whatever the discipline is, there is an example out there or even a syllabus or something that explains a way to incorporate climate change education into that topic. We are going to be having faculty workshops around these hopefully starting this summer.
Mary Fischer:
Dining, I'm going to talk about in a minute. In terms of grounds and vehicles, so we have just hired a new grounds manager. We had, for those of you who may have known him, Dennis Finn was here for years and years and years and years. I know we miss him dearly and his replacement was here for about nine months before somehow he had another great job offer opportunity that he went for, so we had someone in between. Now we've just rehired or not rehired, but we've just hired a new grounds manager, a person who's coming from, oh gosh, I think Harvard or MIT. I can't remember. I was on the interview panel so this is the important part, was that I got to be on the interview panel and ask those questions about, "What do you know about integrated pest management? What do you do for organic grounds practices?" So that I could give my input and say, "I think this person's going to be the best for sustainability." What we're going to be doing with that person is working with the Brandeis chapter of Herbicide Free Campus and put together Brandeis' first ever integrated pest management plan.
Mary Fischer:
Then we're also going to go through and ID some places on campus where we can transition from sort of more intensively managed turf to more lightly managed meadow or Lomo grass or things that can bring back the ecosystem. We do have a pollinator meadow on the science hill which that happened about four or five years ago, where it's just pollinator friendly plants, wild flowers, things like that and there's a great graphic there for that. That's what we're going to be doing on grounds management. Let's talk dining. Let's see. I'm going to do one more video here. I thought it would be fun to show people what it looks like in a dining hall today. I had one of my students walk around Sherman with their phone camera on just so you can see what it looks like. Let me pull that up and hit play here, go back to the beginning.
Mary Fischer:
One of the things you'll probably notice is we have a lot of digital signage now, that's probably fairly new. You'll see all of our dining hall staff, they're actually handing out individual containers to students based on what they want, so rather than an all you can eat buffet situation. We have some different stations, so that's what the lingo and those are called the Marinara station. That's new this year. It's Italian food. This is a new station called the chef's table and so that's where you have your more, like filet of salmon with local sweet potatoes. This is the grill station and your deli station and there's a salad.... You can see there's not a lot of students there. Everyone's wearing their mask and there's a lot of bags. He's putting his stuff in a bag there and then if you want a drink, someone's handing you a drink, so you're not going and you're not refilling a drink. You're being handed a drink.
Mary Fischer:
That's the regular side. You can see the dining, the actual seats are pretty empty. Not that many people are dining inside. Then right here, I'm going to talk about this in a second, but these are single utensil dispensers. That's a tongue twister. We switched to those actually as a waste reduction compared to the other utensils that we were using. I'll stop that there and I'm going to go into our dining initiatives. For those who are not aware, Sodexo is our dining partner. We had put their contract out to bid in 2019 and we had just been kind of witnessed the presentations from the new dining vendors who were bidding on our contract, essentially the week before COVID hit. Beginning of March, we're getting wined and dined as it were, not really. Dining vendors came into Sherman Function Hall, set it up with their different stations and tastings and everything, gave us a big presentation. It was very big presentations, very big deals. The entire community was invited and lots of people showed up to evaluate our potential dining vendors. Then it was a week or two later that we were sending students home due to COVID.
Mary Fischer:
The university decided that in light of the pandemic, we would resign a contract with Sodexo for two years, but also it would be a new contract. I got to step in and set sustainability goals in that contract. For the first time ever, we have sustainability goals and metrics in our dining services contract and you can imagine now the power that we have to reduce environmental impacts. Because if you think about the environmental impacts of food, and now we have more control over it, it sets us up for a lot of success. I'm going to talk about that now because that's kind of our newest and greatest thing. As a former carbon master, I always come to look at things from a carbon footprint perspective. If you were to take Brandeis' carbon footprint and break it down into kind of normal areas that most sustainability managers look at it, they look at it... called scopes.
Mary Fischer:
Scope one is our purchased fuels like natural gas and oil and things like that. Scope two is our electricity that we get from the grid, just the normal electricity bills we get from our source. Scope three is everything else, just everything else. But I look at it a different way. I look at it as what we can really control. We have very little control over commuting and air travel and things like that. We can try to influence and we can try to guide and we can try to change behavior and things like that. But at the end of the day, it's very difficult to control from a carbon perspective. We have some control over our buildings. I'm going to be showing you a couple examples of changes in our... or I mentioned the LED project in our buildings and we can certainly do energy efficiency projects to reduce our building energy use, but not nearly to the extent that we can with something like our food purchases, which we have a lot of control over.
Mary Fischer:
With this in mind, we went and we used a food carbon footprinting tool again, right up my alley, to assess the carbon footprint of our food that we were purchasing through Sodexo. The kind of short version is that we found that we set a goal for a 2% carbon footprint reduction, kind of saying, "This is our pilot goal, 2% is a pretty doable number we think, and we think you can do it. We model you can do that. You just have to reduce the amount of beef." We started with the beef obviously, because in this graph of protein sources, rumen and animals have the highest footprint, so that's beef, buffalo, we don't serve Buffalo, but lamb, goat, which we also pretty much don't serve. But all those rumen and animals, those are the ones that are producing the most methane and that's why they have such a high footprint.
Mary Fischer:
We said, "How much beef would you have to replace with something else to get a 2% reduction?" And we found it's really 4%. I mean, it's hardly anything. A 4% reduction or trade of beef with poultry or with a plant-based source would be about 50 metric tons of carbon per year, which coincidentally is the same amount of carbon that we reduced by doing that LED lighting project in the Shapiro Campus Center. 50 tons LED project in a building or a 4% beef reduction. Compare that with the cost. The Shapiro Campus LED lighting project was $2 million, reducing beef consumption by 4%, $0. We were probably actually saving money. Looking at it, broadening the scope of what we can look at to make a difference, we can actually find things where we can make small changes and make as big a difference as something that costs a lot of money so again, win, win, win.
Mary Fischer:
Again, and these are just some other footprints just as an FYI of different plant alternatives. Again, kind of the idea being you want to reduce the amount of the animal based proteins or animal sourced milk products. I'll explain a little bit of how Sodexo is doing that. The initiatives that Sodexo has put in place to meet the goals that we put out for them are for example, so they're reducing beef in menus. They figured out that they are going to make beef appear in menus fewer times. They have a menu cycle. If you remember being here, you probably ate a lot of the same things over and over. It's a menu cycle, so they can plan months ahead. They found beef appeared 32 times in a menu cycle in the fall. It's going to be 19 times now. The default burger at the grill station is a mushroom blended burger, which means it's not 100% ground beef. It's 75% ground beef, plus 25% local mushrooms and onions blended in. Someone really wants that pure beef burger, they can still get it, but the default that's ready-made is going to be that mushroom burger. Doing this, they reduce their ground beef purchasing by 50%, just by doing these things.
Mary Fischer:
Another initiative to reduce the footprint is to have more meatless Monday. Before we had to do... it was a big deal trying to get Sodexo to do a meatless Monday. It's like, "Oh, just call it Monday and just don't have meat." It's like, "Just do it." Now we have them twice a month, so one in each dining hall instead of once a semester, so that's huge. They have a ton of plant-based events. They always do kind of programming, "Today we have a special salad in this dining hall. Today we have a special this and that." They target 30% of all of their events to be plant-based. Then they have two new stations, so they have a bowl station where bowls are really big these days so you can go and you can build your grain bowl with your vegetables and your sauces and the things you want to put on top of it and there's also a smoothie concept.
Mary Fischer:
Listen to me, I'm sounding like a dining vendor, a smoothie concept. There's a smoothie station where you can go and you can get a smoothie bowl, but you can get it with almond milk or soy milk or an alternative to cow milk, so that reduces that there. Then another thing that we're doing around dining is that we're trying to push New England agriculture. Our Professor Brian Donahue in the environmental studies department was the lead author of this, A New England Food Vision a few years ago which called for New England to build up its agricultural capacity to supply 50% of the food that we in New England actually consume by 2060. Obviously we have squash, yams, mushrooms, apples, pretty much all year round here, but New England has 14 million or I'm sorry, New England needs 14 million acres of farmland to feed all of us here in New England. And right now we only have about 2 million acres of farmland.
Mary Fischer:
The idea is that we can be more sustainable as a region by building up our local agriculture. Our goal for our dining program is to increase the amount of money we're spending on that local agriculture every year. These are year over year goals, every year they have to improve incrementally. Then the other thing is that we... same thing goes for foods with sustainable attributes. There's lots of different labels out there. We can talk about those all day. We picked the ones that we think are real and make a difference. These are the ones that count toward having a sustainable attribute. Anything with a sustainable attribute counts toward this and they have to increase again the proportion that they are spending on sustainable attributes year over year.
Mary Fischer:
This is an example of one of the foods that meets a sustainable attribute, which is kind of a new thing so Sodexo and the World Wildlife Fund came out with a list of 50 foods that are sustainable and tastes good and attainable. One of them is amaranth, which is a grain. It's this big, purple, beautiful, gigantic looking wheat stock and it produces this green that's high quality protein. It's gluten-free. The plant itself doesn't need a lot of water or fertilizer. It grows easily. It can grow under severe drought conditions. Anyway, so we're taking lessons from these foods and putting them in our menu. This is an example of a menu item that was on our menu recently.
Mary Fischer:
Obviously waste reduction is a huge part of dining. Number one is that they implemented a program called Leanpath where they're actually weighing food that comes off the line and putting it right in, not to compost bin, right in the dining hall. They're tracking how much they're wasting, and this is a really big deal because it's changing the chefs mindsets when they're actually cooking the food. Our chefs have been on campus for, some of them decades and they're used to making the same amount of scrambled eggs every morning, or the same amount of mashed potatoes in the evening. It's only by actually physically weighing it and seeing the reports and seeing the numbers that they actually start to change their mindset, "Maybe I don't have to make as much food." Again, we used to give... so for COVID we were giving out these pre-packaged utensil sets and now we're only doing these single utensils ones that are actually compostable as well. Now we've got almost everything that's single use in the dining halls is compostable. You can also opt out of getting utensils if you're ordering from upper use down.
Mary Fischer:
Preliminary results in dining are actually amazing. We asked them to reduce their footprint 2%, they're at least 4%. Increase New England source foods, they're getting there. Increasing foods with sustainable attributes, we asked them to increase by 2%, they've increased by 4%. They've doubled the amount of plant protein that they're serving. The compost rate is way higher than the kind of bar that we set for them. The recycling rate's a little bit lower, but not too worried about that. Recycling is tough for everyone these days. I just want to quickly go over kind of what you can do and then we'll go to questions.
Mary Fischer:
Number one is, we got this question a lot in the registration page is what can I do as an alum? Let the Board of Trustees know that you care about this. You want Brandeis to be a leader on climate change and you want them to commit to a carbon neutrality date, ideally 2030. That's what the science is telling us. We want to follow the science. The science is telling us that we need to make drastic changes by 2030, or we're on track for even worse than we are now. Just let Institutional Advancement know that you'd be interested in giving to Brandeis for green initiatives. For example, if we get to go forward with new solar installations, that could be something that you could help us do and that would be fantastic.
Mary Fischer:
We have a comment forum on the Sustainability Committee website. I put the link there and we can share that in the follow-up email and then being more sustainable at home. My recommendations for that are buy green energy through your utility company, wash your clothes in cold water, skip the dryer, waste less food and one of my favorite quotes, "eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Here's the data behind that and we'll send these around afterward, but this is the data. The data is showing us that what we've been told our whole lives about how to be sustainable, like to recycle or to upgrade your light bulbs, really doesn't have the biggest impact. These are the things in green that have the biggest impact. A lot of them are not doable. It's not about what's doable, but if you just look at the plant-based diet piece alone, just kind of switching some of your animal based choices to plant-based has a much bigger impact than recycling or upgrading your light bulbs. That's the data.
Mary Fischer:
One more slide. I'll let you look at this at home, which is about packaging and food waste. Packaging really doesn't have that big of an impact on the climate. It's a problem, but it's not a climate problem. That's it so I will take questions with our last six or seven here.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. Thank you, Mary. We do have a few questions here around a few different themes, so starting with Rachel Loonin, dining hall questions.
Rachel Loonin:
Am I supposed to ask my question?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Yep, absolutely.
Rachel Loonin:
I'm sorry. Hold on. I had a couple of questions regarding in the dining halls, so first of all, based on the composting that you were talking about does that mean that anybody who eats in Sherman can compost their compostable leftover? And if that's the case, do kosher line people have that opportunity to also compost what's left on their plate that's not animal-based?
Mary Fischer:
Yes and yes. There are stations at every exit at Sherman, there's a station for trash recycling and compost and also other places throughout each side.
Rachel Loonin:
Awesome. Great. Then my other question was just about the kind of oil that's being used in the cafeterias these days, specifically for the fryers for French fries and anything that's fried. Is it still vegetable oil or soybean oil or has there been an exploration for alternatives?
Mary Fischer:
I am not sure. I don't know the answer to that. What would be your recommendation? What would you like to see?
Rachel Loonin:
Well, there are people who have soy allergies and so they can't eat anything fried in traditional vegetable oil, which is soybean oil. The alternative in healthy fast food places, for example, there's a healthy kind of fast food thing in our local whole foods that they use canola oil in their fryer.
Mary Fischer:
Okay. Thanks.
Rachel Loonin:
Thank you.
Sharon Rosenberg:
We have three more questions. We're going to go Mary, then Christine, and then Laura.
Mary Dateo:
Hi, it's Mary. I was just asking if... That's great about the grounds. I'm excited about the pollinator gardens and more non lawn alternatives. I was wondering if there's been any thought about transitioning from a gas powered maintenance equipment to electrical. Because my understanding is there's some really decent electrical professional level tools available in the market these days.
Mary Fischer:
Yeah, we have and so that's going to be one of our discussions with our new grounds manager, for sure. Now that we have this Sustainability Committee, we can also make that a formal recommendation so that if for whatever reason the grounds manager doesn't like the idea of electric blowers, we can definitely kind of push that from another angle as well.
Mary Dateo:
Oh, that's great. I just thought presentation and they say it's actually a really key thing to a good adoption is actually being trained to use the equipment properly because you have to use it a different way. Thank you.
Mary Fischer:
Sure. Yep. Definitely. Thank you.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Okay, great. Christine.
Christine Chilingerian:
Mary, I Just want to say thank you so much for this excellent presentation. You talked a little bit about the huge success that you've had with getting metrics added to the dining contracts. I'm just curious from your perspective, how difficult is it for you to get your elbows into those larger vendor contracts on campus? Obviously sustainability is a priority, but to what degree do you have to fight for that?
Mary Fischer:
The ease comes from the people above me caring about sustainability. Our VP of operations who... so I report up to one, two, three, four levels, all four of those levels are very into sustainability. Stew Uretsky, who I can't remember... This is embarrassing. I can't remember if he's chief operating officer. Long story short he used to work for a conservation organization and a solar company, Lois Stanley, she came to us from Tufts about a year and a half ago as our VP of operations, Tailon Ikechi, who is my direct boss, just came from Tufts as well, super into sustainability. When they say, "Mary, we trust you, we're going to include you in this process." it's super easy. Before that, it was like beating my head against a wall with Sodexo. It's been a really good transition
Christine Chilingerian:
Bravo. Well done.
Mary Fischer:
Thank you.
Sharon Rosenberg:
And one final question, Laura.
Laura Cahn:
Thank you. I liked your graphs about how much carbon different kinds of products take animal versus plant, but are you considering the amount of water it takes to produce say almond versus meat or whatever? Thanks.
Mary Fischer:
Yep. Yes, we are.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. Thank you very much, Mary. This is a lot of awesome information, very exciting to hear about everything that's going on at Brandeis with sustainability. Thanks to all of you for joining us this evening. As Mary mentioned, we will share the recording. It usually takes about a week after the event just to get the recording all set with the transcript and sometimes just to make it fully accessible for viewing and we'll have that and we'll share and slides and all the information and links to the Brandeis sustainability website. Also please continue to check your email for information about other upcoming events, alumni college, which normally is one day on the first day of alumni weekend is actually going to be a series of 10 different events taking place between the end of April and the end of June, so please look out for information about that. Of course, alumni weekend itself is all virtual this year, June 11th through 13th, including milestone reunions for classes ending in zero, five, one and six. Then just some come all events that are open to everyone as well as just several more events that are coming up separate from alumni college and alumni weekend, so please be on the lookout for that as well. Thank you again for joining us. Stay safe, stay healthy and have good night.