UGA to implement the "green fee" for campus substainability

By: Carrie Donovan

Beginning in Spring 2010, students attending UGA will be paying a new $3 “green fee,” which will raise about $150,000 a year to go towards a new Office of Sustainability responsible for consolidating various environmental and sustainability efforts at UGA. Sheena Zhang and Rachel Spencer, both members of Go Green Alliance, the environmental organization that developed and promoted the fee, explain how the fee originated in their organization, and how students are embracing it as a positive change for the University.


Q: What exactly is Go Green Alliance?

A: Spencer: It’s basically an organization that strives to bring together all of the environmental groups on campus. It allows them to communicate and really have a dialogue going between everyone working towards environmental initiatives. But we have people there from housing, like residential halls on campus, and then environmental health science club, students for environmental action, there are a lot of different organizations involved, but it basically promotes different environmental organizations on campus as a single body.

A: Zhang: The purpose of Go Green Alliance is also kind of two fold. It serves primarily as a support system and a sort of place for all of these different environmental groups to network, but actually in the beginning was specifically aimed at pursuing the green initiative fund.


Q: So do you think any specific members of the organization played a strong role in bringing the benefits of a green fee to the administration’s attention?


A: Zhang: It started last year actually, with Christina Faust and Andrew Durso, who were the previous co-chairs of Go Green Alliance. They spent a lot of time talking to the administration about different sustainability initiatives they wanted to see on campus. One of the ideas that came up was to have a green initiative fund for students to fund projects that students wanted to see on campus, and so then Emily Carol and Mark Milby kind of took the torch from that and they basically have spent a lot of time talking to specific administrators and putting together their proposal, which illustrates exactly how an office of sustainability would operate and how the green initiative fund would work.

Q: So why exactly does Go Green think that a sustainability office would be the best way to put the $3 fee to use?

A: Zhang: Basically it’s someone the administration can go to, it’s someone the alumni, students, visitors, basically someone who knows about all the sustainability issues on campus that most people don’t have time to become involved with. Now, with the green fee, we can finally have a position dedicated specifically to looking into ways to make UGA more sustainable.

Q: Will students still be able to develop their own proposals and have an individual impact, now that there will be an official faculty position dedicated specifically towards tackling sustainability issues?
A: Spencer: Actually, yes, it will be extremely beneficial for students. Groups are going to be able to apply to the office of sustainability for grants, and they will allocate funds to projects that they believe will be beneficial to campus sustainability, so in that way individual groups and students can have a significant impact through the office. The office will promote its own initiatives, but definitely with a heavy element of student involvement. It will create more opportunities for students, who before hand had to take on the administration alone if they wanted to get anything accomplished. Now, we have a sort of bridge that will make achieving a more sustainable campus a much more realistic possibility.

Edited by: Marlyncia Pierce