Who knew that a fledgling, student-led project could make such an impact on UH Manoa’s enormous energy consumption, and provide a workable model of sustainability for the campus and beyond?
Our project began when we formed a team called the HUB (Help Us Bridge), a multidisciplinary group of students passionate about sustainability. Inspired to created tangible change, our first initiative, Sustainable Saunders, strove to transform one building, Saunders Hall, into a model of sustainability for the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus, Hawaii and beyond. Our motto of live, connect, create represented our goal of bridging with the campus and extended community. An ancient symbol for energy became our logo when we changed the colors to a blue ring around a green circle. Some people see the Earth surrounded by the sky, some see an island in the ocean. We see blue-sky envisioning grounded in proven green principles. With our identity in place, we were ready to take action.
We immediately made an impact with an Interactive Launch Party on Earth Day 2006 when we invited over 100 community experts, politicians and business leaders to help us host our Interactive Launch Party. A thousand community members came out to help us celebrate!
Meeting daily, we earned a reputation for turning ideas into action. We installed odorless, waterless urinals and low flow toilets, tested indigenous plants for green roofs, installed some of the first solar panels at UHM, received a donation of a building mounted wind-turbine, built a community courtyard with recycled lumber, performed “dumpster dive” waste audits, implemented a recycling program for each department, and installed low-water plants on the balconies. We delamped (removed) 50% of the lightbulbs in Saunders, greatly reducing headaches and eyestrains reported by occupants. Combined with timed air conditioning shut downs, we were able to reduce Saunder’s energy use by 24% in one year, saving $149,900 annually without spending a cent.
Based on Saunders’ success, delamping and A/C shutdowns have become campus-wide initiatives at UH Manoa.
Simultaneous to these projects, we have hosted hundreds of participants at campus-wide workshops, BBQ’s and prestigious speaking events every semester. Our Interactive Launch Party has evolved into the largest annual Earth Day celebration on O‘ahu with over 100 community vendors, 100 student volunteers and over 3,000 guests. We have 
followed a model from Harvard and launched a Student Sustainability Internship Program (SSIP) in which students have performed energy and waste audits for clients including Whole Foods and the U.S. Coast Guard. We have also designed a Sustainability 101 course to bring our new students up to speed each semester. We were asked to share this curriculum so faculty on each campus could teach it simultaneously on Earth Day 2008, and have also tailored the curriculum for KCC Outreach College, UH Manoa Outreach College, and the DOE Construction Academy so far. In addition to getting some great professional experience, a bunch of us have earned academic credit through a Community Internship course taught by our Coordinator, Shanah Trevenna.
Our new initiative, Sustainable UH, extends the momentum of Sustainable Saunders to those throughout the UH system requesting our services. The first requests came from Honolulu Community College (HCC) and the Student Bar Association at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who intend to make the Richardson School of Law the greenest Law School in America. Our goal is to replicate our success at Saunders by achieving $150,000 in energy saving over 2009-2010 academic year, all while training students for Hawaii’s green work force.
In 2006, we began this journey with a vision that Hawaii would be a world leader in sustainability. Today this vision has become more and more of reality for us. We feel honored to share our unique interests and talents to facilitate community and bridge with all those who share this vision.
