A Message from President Morishita: Inside East Bay, February 2019
- February 6, 2019
The new year is off to an exciting start, and with it, Cal State East Bay is taking steps toward a more sustainable future. I am pleased to announce the university will be joining a CSU-wide effort to ban all single-use plastics from campus by 2023. The ban includes items such as plastic straws, water bottles and plastic bags, and encourages vendors to replace them with reusable, compostable or recyclable products. Nearby Alameda and Contra Costa counties have similar bans barring plastic bags, but Cal State East Bay’s policy will go beyond those regulations.
While this is the first time our three campuses have banned plastics, it is just one of many ways Cal State East Bay is cultivating a sustainable campus. Just recently, Facilities Management installed several water bottle filling stations around campus (look for them in the SA and SF buildings and outside the bookstore), overall irrigation usage has been reduced thanks to the planting of native drought tolerant plants, and bathrooms have been outfitted with low flow faucets and toilets.
Last year, the Campus Sustainability Committee and the Academic Senate Sustainability Committee developed and proposed a which was approved in April 2018. A target date of 2040 was set to achieve climate neutrality; by then, the university will have a net zero carbon footprint by balancing the amount of carbon released with an equal amount of carbon offset or sequestered.
In a few months we will complete the application. The resulting “STARS rating” will give us a baseline for how the campus is performing in sustainability as it relates to academics, engagement, planning and administration.
Understanding the concept of sustainability and practicing what we teach our students every day is an essential part of educating and preparing our students for the complex problems confronting us now and what they will face after graduating. I am pleased to report that the start of semester conversion marked the beginning of with sustainability overlays — graduation prerequisites that are in alignment with the university’s institutional learning outcomes. I hope we can increase the current list of 41 courses to further our student’s understanding of this critically important issue.
I appreciate the progress we have made at East Bay and will continue to champion the efforts by students, faculty and staff to make our campus more sustainable.