HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

At the reopening of the newly renovated and more eco-friendly Dunster/Mather dining hall, University Dining Services held a gathering for current and former staff, as well as representatives from organizations across the University. (Staff photo T.J. Kirkpatrick/Harvard News Office)

Facilities Maintenance Operations' Supervisor of Waste Management Robert Gogan said the projects represent about half of the construction taking place at the University this summer and achieved recycling rates of 93 percent and higher. The July rate at the 46 Blackstone St. renovation was more than 99 percent.

"This includes asphalt, bricks, concrete, lumber, gypsum drywall, doors, windows, flooring, whatever happens to be in [the waste stream]," Gogan said.

Though the construction industry has always practiced a certain amount of recycling, Gogan said that the current push to achieve national green building standards has increased the emphasis on recycling and reusing as much as possible. As of early August, the projects had reclaimed 1,841 tons of debris, an amount equal to 93 percent of all refuse. Together with the Institution Recycling Network, the University found several nonprofit organizations that could benefit from furniture and equipment that could be reused, including the Cambridge Community Center and Food for the Poor.

The construction recycling success was echoed more broadly across the University in July, when the Harvard-wide recycling rate reached a record 46 percent.

The Dunster-Mather dining hall renovation donated the old kitchen equipment such as stoves, refrigerators, vent hoods, steamers, and other kinds of equipment.

"Reuse is always better than recycling," Gogan said. "There's a lot of embedded resources in manufactured products. If you can take a finished product and reuse it for its original purpose, you've saved not only money, but a huge amount of environmental impact."

Late last week, Harvard Dining Services officials hosted a grand reopening of the Dunster-Mather dining hall, serving lunch for administrators and current and former kitchen staff. Dining Services' Director of Facilities and Physical Plant Robert Leandro walked visitors through the new facility, pointing out not only food service additions, such as salad and deli bars, but also newly installed equipment meant to make the operation greener.

In addition to recycling 96 percent of construction debris and donating the old kitchen equipment, Leandro said, the project installed energy-efficient lighting; equipment to compost food and napkins, as well as reclaim cooking oil; dishwashers that use one-fourth the water of the old models; and smart vent hoods that can vary speed to meet ventilation needs.

"In the old days, [food waste] would go down the drain, now it gets ground up and goes in a slurry to be composted," Leandro said.

Leandro said Dining Services began requiring construction debris to be recycled last summer, when it renovated the Quincy House dining hall, achieving a 94 percent recycling rate.

At the 46 Blackstone St. project, University Operations Services workers are renovating three buildings on the site of the steam plant that Harvard bought in 2002. Gogan said that care has been taken to select options that make sense environmentally. He cited the decision to preserve huge 12-inch-by-12-inch beams that would be difficult to find today, by stripping them down and refinishing them so they can be seen in the finished interior.

"Not only have we conserved the utility of 100-year-old beams, but we've uncovered something that is absolutely gorgeous that modern materials can't match," Gogan said.

George Oommen, senior project manager at the Blackstone Street site, said the 99 percent recycling rate was achieved through a careful inventory before any work was done, followed by planning on how to reuse and recycle the maximum amount of materials.

"You name it, we can recycle almost anything," Oommen said.

Jeffrey Smith, director of Facilities Maintenance Operations, said the Blackstone Street project is a bit of an experimental lab for sustainable construction techniques. In addition to the interior renovations and reuse of refrigerators and other equipment, Smith said the project is breaking up the extensive expanses of exterior asphalt and replacing it with trees and grass.

"We're adding green space to what was essentially a sea of asphalt," Smith said. "We've done a variety of things to promote sustainability and to use it as a lab for other projects at Harvard."

Two other projects Gogan mentioned include the renovation of the Radcliffe gym and of Hamilton Hall at Harvard Business School. In both cases, a large amount of surplus furniture was available and donated for reuse. At Hamilton Hall, 10 tractor-trailer loads of beds, desks, doors, and mirrors were donated to Food for the Poor, which planned to use the furniture to help areas in Central America hit by hurricanes earlier this year.

"The easiest thing to do would be to rent a dumpster and load it up," Gogan said. "Certainly the environmental and nonprofit organizations and needy individuals were glad to get it instead."

alvin_powell@harvard.edu

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