Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Addie Hill: Sustainability House of Barrett is a community of friends, essentially of students who live together and all like being able to live with people who share their same values and goals. It means that you have a friend next door who can teach you how to compost and you have a friend next door who’s involved with a service project that goes down to Guatemala and helps out in all different–let’s see. We had some kids go to El Salvador last year and work with some impoverished communities there. It’s pretty much anything from social justice to economics to environmental sustainability. It’s great to be able to live with everybody and have everybody in the same community so we can work towards common goals.

Mark Jacobs: There are 250 students in that complex. They are being taught–I mean, many of them are sustainability majors at ASU. That’s a major available to all ASU students. It’s not in the Honors College, but that is their major. They’re involving what their findings in their own living community in many of their courses. They’re having some special courses taught at Sustainability House. The building has recycled gray water. It has individual room and hall energy monitoring. It has a green room that also has as part of that an organic garden. It’s going to have solar panels on its roof. Those haven’t been fitted in yet.

The sustainable living house also has a central courtyard that starts on the second floor so that it’s a private courtyard. Several meeting rooms that have dashboard like TV screens in them so the students can have a meeting about how they’re doing with their sustainable living goals and call up the data from each hall and each floor of the whole complex to even have competitions between floors. This will be data on electric use for lights, on energy use for cooling and heating, all on a central touch screen where they can compare and contrast.

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The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.