Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Support the IDS in College Media Madness! Donate here March 24 - April 8.
Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

IMU practices eco-friendly strategies

Campus Filler

The Indiana Memorial Union is concluding renovations on the Biddle Hotel and implementing new green practices as part of the renovations. The hotel is only one of many environmentally-friendly changes being implemented at the IMU this year.

Michael Campbell, associate director of the IMU, said being green is important to the renovation process. He said they asked for it to be a point of consideration in selecting furnishings for the rooms.

“We converted all the lighting, everything is now LED or CSL,” Campbell said. “It has reduced our energy consumption dramatically.”

In addition to reducing energy consumption, renovations include reducing water consumption and 
purchasing paint and carpeting with minimal carcinogens and environmental toxins. Campbell said such changes are going to eventually be applied through the rest of the Union, which will add to the current green practices employed there.

“There is actually a small array of solar panels on the roof,” Campbell said. “We even looked into parking operations and potentially getting electronic charging stations for cars.”

The hotel is only one step in a much larger process of trying to find what environmentally-friendly methods are feasible at the IMU. Campbell said at one point there were efforts to compost organic waste from the food services in the Union.

“Sustainability is important to the food industry,” Campbell said. “We were carting off the waste to a farmer who was doing the composting for us, but the volume was so high the farmer said he could not handle it and we had to stop.”

Campbell said he would like to see a long-term solution for the large amount of waste the IMU food services produce, but he is not sure what that is at this point. It is possible for this strategy to work on a smaller scale though, when applied to IMU program, Indiana University Outdoor Adventures.

IUOA was founded as an opportunity for outdoor recreation and has since grown into a program funded through the IMU offering classes to IU students along with adventure trips open to the Bloomington community in addition to IU students.

As part of its classes and trips, IUOA practices Leave No Trace principles. Leave No Trace is a series of seven 
principles to apply outdoors to minimize human impact and maintain high quality outdoor experiences. However, IUOA has taken steps to apply the principles in its IU office and program practices on campus.

Sophomore Izzy Krahling, IUOA leader, said she has taken a personal interest in making IUOA more eco-friendly. She and Tyler Kivland, event coordinator at IUOA, have been experimenting with practices to reduce the group’s ecological footprint.

“We have been composting for over two years now,” Krahling said. “Tyler took care of it, he took the white five gallon buckets of waste home to compost there.”

However after years of carting compost buckets around in his car Kivland began looking for an alternative. He contacted Hilltop Gardens and asked if it had any compost barrels it was willing to sell.

Not only did the Hilltop Gardens have spare buckets, but it was willing to give them to Kivland free of charge.

“The organic waste goes into the barrels and gets mixed with leaves, and it turns into dirt,” Krahling said. “We then use the dirt for Tyler’s plants in his office, and I believe he just gives them out as gifts after that.”

Though IUOA is no longer located in the IMU because it moved to a larger location in the basement of Eigenmann Hall, it is still trying to uphold the IMU’s greening goals.

“We are trying to move to online paperwork,” Krahling said. “All of our tests and in-class information is online, we try to communicate online. Overall we are trying to use less paper. When we get ready to go out in the field we use pages and pages of paper.”

Krahling said she would like to see the implementation of digital GPS on trips, despite most trip leaders use their phones to navigate.

“There are a lot of people at OA who have a personal connection to the environment, many of them are in outdoor education or SPEA,” Krahling said.

She said at IUOA, they look for environmentally-friendly methods because they enjoy going outside and want to be able to keep going out and enjoying nature.

Get stories like this in your inbox
Subscribe