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Your Earth Month roundup and sustainability updates from the Office of Sustainability

Spring 2025 Newsletter 

Earth Month activities

‌Earth Month at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø is in full swing! We kicked it off with the on Saturday, April 5, which focused on connecting ideas, building futures, and collaborating for a sustainable community. Our Spring Garden Celebration and Beats 4 Beets events were also rousing successes.

‌At 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 22, the EcoMore team will host an Earth Day Palooza to help students make sustainable DIYs, and later this week, we will celebrate Arbor Day by planting trees on Friday, April 25. Find a full list of Earth Month events on the Sustainability website. 

Donate to Give+Go

‌‌From April 28 to May 18, students can donate unopened non-perishable food, clothing, and gently used home goods via bins located around campus to be distributed to our local nonprofit partners as part of the Give+Go program. Read more about it on the Give+Go website.

Updates on Sustainable Operations

Energy monitoring implementations 

‌ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø is investing in an energy and power monitoring system to support energy management and identify opportunities for operational efficiencies and energy savings. Spearheaded by Facilities Services, the College will be installing building-level metering, starting with the Tisch Learning Center, Janet Kinghorn Bernhard Theater, and Jonsson Tower. The metering and energy platform will allow ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø to develop an energy benchmarking process, improve energy decision-making, and drive awareness to support energy conservation and efficiency projects.

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‌Campus Decarbonization Academy 

‌Dan Rodecker, assistant vice president of facilities and planning, and Tarah Rowse, director of sustainability programs and assessment, are participating in the , a six-month, cohort-based virtual program offered by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education to empower higher education leaders to drive impactful decarbonization initiatives on their campuses.

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‌Reuzzi partnership 

‌The Sustainability Office is excited to announce a new partnership with , an app designed to track and manage reusable containers, founded by alum Cheryl Schnitzer '94. Dining Services and the Sustainability Office will be collaborating to shift the ReuseMore program over to the new system this summer, in order to improve to-go container return rates and further reduce the use of single-use plastics.

Student-led Sustainability

Tree Inventory

North Woods stewards Priscilla Kayku '25 and Margot Kelly '25 spent the summer identifying, measuring, and assessing the health of over 1,800 campus trees for an . The inventory will help the community better understand the value of our trees as well as support tree care planning and management efforts. This work advances Campus Master Plan and Sustainable Landscape Plan goals and enhances ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø’s participation in the Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree Campus Program.

Food Inventory

Sustainability interns Margot Kelly '25 and Colson Warren '27 conducted a food inventory at Murray-Aikins Dining Hall to assess the amount of local, sustainable, and plant-based food. This work will be featured in ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø’s 2025 AASHE STARS certification. The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Community Garden, led by student managers Roman Grinevics '27 (2024 season) and Ezri Rubenstein-Miller '28 (2025 season), supplies approximately 500 pounds of produce annually.

2025 Green Grant Award winners

Grants totaling $5000 were awarded to three campus sustainability projects: ‌Rachel Entin-Bell '27 plans to install bird-strike protection films on the Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences to reduce the potential of bird collisions. Justin Pollard '27 will establish sustainable mushroom cultivation on campus utilizing mushroom inoculation of local oak logs for use in Murray-Aikins Dining Hall. Zak Maxey '27 is planning to restore landfill-bound Adirondack chairs on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø’s campus.

Campus leaders

The EcoMore team led waste diversion efforts at Founder’s Day, hosted a campus sustainability scavenger hunt, conducted a waste audit, held a leaf print workshop, and is holding an Earth Day Palooza event. Compost managers expanded the student-run residential compost program to include buckets in almost every academic building on campus and presented a poster about the program at the NYS Organics Summit.

Your New Sustainability Coordinator:

‌Celia Darling (she/her) fostered her passion for sustainability while growing up and working on a family Christmas tree farm outside of Rochester, New York. With a background in youth climate organizing, Darling earned her master’s and bachelor’s degrees (environmental policy and political science, respectively) at Clarkson University, where her graduate work focused on community engagement in Lake Placid’s LEED community recertification process.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

 815 North Broadway

 Saratoga Springs, N.Y. 12866

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