Nine private universities in Middle Tennessee are stepping up efforts to be more environmentally friendly. Aquinas, Belmont, Cumberland, Fisk, Free Will Baptist, Lipscomb, Sewanee, Trevecca Nazarene and Vanderbilt are among 30 private colleges across Tennessee that have partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency for what’s called “peer auditing.”
Beginning this fall, a team of four people will visit the state’s private colleges to evaluate whether each campus is in line with current EPA standards.
Dr. Susanna Baxter with the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Associations explains.
“The peer auditors are a diverse group of people, from chemistry faculty to biology faculty to art faculty. They’ve got tablet PC’s and cameras they will walk around and go in every building, look in every closet, in every cabinet, scouring that campus and looking to make sure that campuses are doing what they should be doing within the environment.”
Baxter says the peer audits will not take place of the regular, random audits the EPA conducts yearly and there won’t be any penalties for environmental infractions. Instead, the peer auditing is meant to encourage Tennessee’s private colleges and universities to share information and best practices for not only meeting EPA requirements, but exceeding them.
The audits begin this fall with Belmont University and Trevecca Nazarene University with subsequent campus audits each semester until 2010.
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