After being hired last February as the College's first sustainability director, Merkel said he has spent his time since starting work last June by listening to students' and administrators' concerns. He has 11 projects in the works, he said, but none have been completed.
"I spent the first three months in a high listening mode, trying to put together a set of projects that there was already a historic interest in, or movement," Merkel said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Merkel said that basic resource consumption at Dartmouth is very high by global standards, and that Dartmouth students consume somewhere between five and six times more energy than the average person on the planet.
He said he has found that making adjustments at Dartmouth will take longer than he had expected because of a general resistance to change and the various constraints College departments operate under. Merkel said that he expects to reduce administrators' resistance by learning more about Dartmouth's managerial culture.
"People are used to doing things a certain way, and sustainability is going to ask us to change almost everything we do," Merkel said. "Any time I tried to move too fast on something, I could see that there was resistance [from administrators]."
Merkel said he would not name the administrators who have been reluctant to adopt his plans because doing so could jeopardize future projects.
Another setback Merkel said he encountered is general institutional lag at Dartmouth. However, he blamed this on his own lack of knowledge of the tasks that the College's departments are charged with, including the Office of Residential Life's job of turning over 13,000 beds every year and Dartmouth Dining Services' operation of 12 venues.
Merkel said that ORL's plans to remodel the older dorms on campus presents the perfect opportunity to incorporate sustainability into the buildings, but that sustainability gets outweighed by aesthetics, budget and schedule.
"Sustainability is the thing we ... can do without, if the budget and schedule are over their limit," Merkel said of administrators' views.
Merkel said he thinks that his appointment is just the beginning of a major movement for Dartmouth. He compared his job to Harvard's sustainibilty program, the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, which started with one person and now counts 13 employees.
"Hiring me is the first step in starting the conversation," Merkel said. "In the end it needs to be quite a large-scale program with quite a lot of people working."
As the College's energy consumption skyrocketed a couple years ago and plateaued this year, Merkel is pushing for a diversification of the College's energy portfolio and more reliance on "green" energy. He said Dartmouth's dependency on fossil fuels as a primary energy source is risky and leaves the institution exposed to volatile prices and shortages.
As the College undertakes large-scale construction projects, the cost of building materials like concrete, steel and glass will be linked to energy prices, he said.
"We could have huge overruns on our buildings if we don't look for new energy," Merkel said.
Merkel also proposes converting Homeplate into a waste-free dining facility.
"Just imagine if you took [all of] your meals there and by the end of the day you didn't throw out any garbage," Merkel said. "Just imagine that in one day, as a person here at Dartmouth, you didn't need a garbage can, you didn't even need a recycling bin."
The experiment would include cloth napkins and washable take-out containers, which students would have to pay a deposit to use. A wide variety of self-serve drinks would also be offered and drinks in disposable containers would be eliminated, he said.
"We put a person on the moon, we do incredible research here at Dartmouth, what it takes not to throw away garbage is so simple," Merkel said. "This is really simple stuff."
The prototype also calls for Homeplate to serve less beef because it has a more severe impact on the environment than does chicken. More organic and local foods would also be served and the ecological impact of each meal would be stated on the menus.
"I think over time if people see the cost to the earth it would make a difference," Merkel said. "I think people want to do the right thing."
Merkel said DDS is on board for what he says would be cost-cutting changes, and that over the next term, Merkel will be gathering information about programs at other schools, educating DDS and students and making "easier changes" like changing products and packaging, making signs and composting.
