Studying Green Marketing

Green majors are looking into environmental science, environmental economics, environmental law and policy, environmental management--and even environmental marketing.

Students at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, a graduate school that is part of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have created a survey to measure consumer attitudes to green marketing. Not just whether they are buying green products, but how attentive they are to a retailer's overall stance on the environment and sustainability.

Bren is small as grad schools go--just 120 master's 35 doctoral candidates. In addition to its focus on environmental science and management, it also offers a doctoral program in environmental and natural resource economics. Its dean is none other than Ernst von Weizsäcker, the former policy director at the United Nations Centre for Science and Technology for Development and director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy. He also chaired the environmental committee of the Bundestag, Germany's parliament. Bren recently received more than $1 million in gifts from Deckers Outdoor Corp. and a UC Santa Barbara alumnus to support graduate students and programs.

Professor Plastic Power

You may have heard that Discovery Channel is launching a network on environmental issues, Planet Green, next spring. But there are already intimations of what shows will be on the new network, like "Eco-Tech", which ran a segment last night that featured Alan Heeger, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Heeger is already quite well known as one of the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2000. But his research into conducting polymers has led him to develop technology that stands to revolutionize the way we will all go solar. Without abandoning his work at UCSB, Heeger co-founded a company called Konarka Technologies, which makes its headquarters in Lowell, Mass., a town more known as a leader of earlier industrial revolutions than current eco-technology. No matter: Konarka is rolling out Power Plastic®, a photovoltaic material that basically puts solar power cells on flexible plastic, not glass. According to the Discovery Channel report, the technology stands to cut the cost of solar panels in half--if not more--while producing more power.

Universities have gotten very smart about helping professors commercialize their research. Look for a lot more breakthroughs like Heeger's in environmental technology for the mass market.

University, College Win Livable Building Awards

The Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley has chosen higher education buildings to be two of the three winners of its Livable Building Awards for 2007.

Carnegie Institution for Science's Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford University won for features such as a radiant cooling system that has helped to cut carbon emissions from building operations by 72%. Its wood doors were salvaged from old wine vats and it also has an energy-efficient water system.

Also a winner: The Kirsch Center at De Anza College and part of the credit for the award definitely belongs to the Cupertino, Calif., community college's own students. De Anza's student government earmarked $180,000 of its own funds for the center, which has gotten second-highest designation from the U.S. Green Building Council.

With green building so hot a topic on college campuses these days, it's perhaps not surprising that there was also a university among the seven finalists. Donald Bren Hall at the University of California, Santa Barbara was given an honorable mention.