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The University of Notre Dame's Presidential Forum that kicks off Sept. 24 and continues with lectures, films and events through the year will focus on sustainable energy.
Notre Dame is spending $4 million this year to retrofit 25 buildings for greater energy efficiency, and five of its new construction projects in process are seeking Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, including a silver for Innovation Park.
A student "recycling militia" fanned out across tailgates at the first home football game to urge recycling of cans, bottles and cardboard in convenient bins and bags.
The university this year established an Office of Sustainability and hired Jim Mazurek, a 1991 Notre Dame graduate in mechanical engineering who had worked eight years at a high-level consulting firm in Chicago, to direct the effort.
The office will coordinate and extend the broad range of the university's long-standing environmental practices, which include a high level of recycling, improvements to the power plant to reduce emissions and purchase of locally grown food, says John Affleck-Graves, Notre Dame's executive vice president.
"There's a whole variety of things we have been working on," he says. "They've been grass-roots initiatives. We got to the stage where this is such a crucial issue we thought we had to have a centralized office.
"We think we can do a lot more than we have been doing."
Mazurek, who has an MBA from Northwestern University, arrived in May with a 100-Day Plan to establish benchmarks for such factors as carbon footprint, water usage and recycling rates, formalize a vision and strategy, and develop a road map...