UCR certainly puts a good face forward, advertising their recent efforts toward sustainability, which is great! But I come across so many wasteful things on campus that it's hard to consider the university sustainable ... yet. Literally, in every building I step into and in every way I interact with the campus, there is serious waste. I guess it could just be a coincidence that only the buildings I walk into are wasteful, but obviously that's not the case. I suspect it's systemic, and the faculty need to speak up to get things changed (and to secure funding to help that along). We also need real metrics for improvement, and to be held accountable to those metrics.
But let me first start on a positive note. As you know, California has been going through an epic drought the last four years, and everybody realized how bad it really was when we came out of the spring without much rain. Well, over a year ago, I tried to find obvious locations on campus that waste a lot of water for turf grass that isn't used... and there's a LOT of it. Well, the most egregious case, the most asinine example, was a very large plot of grass on the west edge of campus that was used by nobody and, in fact, nobody could even see it!
I estimated that this lawn has an area of about 60,000 sq. ft (about 1.4 acres), and uses about 3 million gallons of water per year, or about 0.4% of all of UCR's water use. All one has to do is turn off a valve and you can instantly save the water use of about ~50 households, and with no harm to anybody.
Well, this morning I realized I needed to call out the university and make sure they do something about this. I rode my bike to that side of campus to check it out and look what I saw!
Dead grass! They killed it! Well done UCR! That's 3 million gallons of potable water saved every year. Thanks!
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