Welcome to the first installment of the Greening UUSC blog series! As UUSC's senior facility and operations associate, I hope to use this forum to keep our members and others updated about the progress we are making as an organization toward sustainability, in an interesting and informative way (dare I say "fun," too, or is that pushing it a bit?), and to foster creative discussions about environmental issues. To get us started, this time let's talk about the basics of sustainability — what the heck is it, anyway, and why should anybody care? 

The term "sustainability" was coined in 1987 and while there is still no official definition, a generally accepted one is: "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Just a fancy way of saying we won't use all of the resources today and leave our children and grandchildren, shall we say, up the creek.

I'll bet the resources you're thinking about at this point are natural resources, like trees to make copy paper, fresh water to drink, energy to do just about everything, etc. That's certainly part of it, but the beauty of sustainability is that it actually involves the interrelationship of three very different business concerns: environmental protection, economic growth, and social responsibility. Without consideration of all of these together, an organization can't be sustainable or have a sustainability plan.

By the way; don't confuse "sustainability" with "being green." They're not the same. Here's an example: If UUSC were to spend $100,000 on solar panels that cut our annual electric bill by $2,000 does that make us greener? Debatable, I suppose, but most people would say yes because of the elimination of the use of fossil fuels to generate our electricity. But does it make us more sustainable? Nope — a 50-year payback on an investment like that is terrible from a financial point of view, since the lifespan of modern solar panels is about 40 years at best. And what if those panels reflected sunlight directly towards a neighboring building, causing glare for their staff and additional heating costs for their organization? In the end, you might have eliminated using some environmental resources, but you've wasted financial resources and social capital with this project. So being sustainable is better than just being green; it means we have made an organization-wide decision to operate using the soundest strategies available.

Why should we care if UUSC is sustainable or not? Some direct results of a sustainability plan are increased community acceptance, cost reductions, waste reduction, increased employee satisfaction, leveraging of purchases to urge suppliers to become sustainable, and many more. But when you get right down to it, it's really pretty simple: by being conscientious about how we use natural resources, acting as good financial stewards of money entrusted to us, and relating to our surrounding community and the communities we reach out to, we can be certain that UUSC will flourish indefinitely into the future — and that's something that we can all feel good about! 

Next time in the Greening UUSC series: LEED certification.