How Green Is Your Campus?

Want to see the best in environmentally friendly interior and exterior design these days? Then take a trip to America's colleges and universities--like Middlebury College in northern Vermont.

It's not just that these buildings are getting high marks from the U.S. Green Building Council for how environmentally friendly they are. They are great examples of architectural inventiveness and great models of how connected a building can be to its surrounding environment.

The Hillcrest Environmental Center is an 1875 farmhouse. Or, rather, was. A recent report by the Associated Press chronicles how the center, which is home to Middlebury's environmental science program, has been reborn with the marks of Vermont, from an old maple sugar tree as ceiling planks to desktops made from sunflower seed shells. Some 40 professors and 90 students a year will find a home here, the college says.

Is $4 million too much to much to spend on sustainability? Middlebury doesn’t seem to think so.

An "A" For Sustainability

Kudos to Harvard University, Dartmouth University, the University of Washington, Middlebury College, Carleton College and the University of Vermont! All of these institutions received an overall "A" grade on the newly released College Sustainability Report Card 2008.

The report card is published by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Sustainable Endowments Institute. It focuses, cleverly enough, on the 200 public and private universities with the largest endowments. The schools were graded in five categories: administration, climate change and energy, food and recycling, green building and transportation. Interestingly, the schools scored their highest grades for food and recycling, with 29% earning an "A" in that category. The report found that 70% of the schools buy food from local farms and that 64% serve fair trade coffee.

You can view the full report card--including the four schools that got overall failing grades--here.