Berea College - Sustainability

Sustainability

Berea's Campus Environmental Policy Committee (CEPC) is developing a set of indicators by which to measure the progress of the college toward ecological sustainability, creates bi-annual reports on that progress, and links the school's efforts to green campus operations with its mission to raise consciousness of environmental issues among faculty, students, and staff.

Berea addresses environmental sustainability from both an operational and an intellectual perspective; the school emphasizes an experiential education for its students, combining hands-on work with academic exploration. Berea's Ecovillage is a living/learning community comprising 50 apartments. The community houses students and student families, and it includes a child development lab, an environmental studies demonstration house, wetlands, a permaculture food forest, individual gardens, and the "ecological machine," which is a wastewater treatment system that naturally treats sewage to reuse quality.

Berea's sustainability initiatives earned it a "B" grade on the 2009 College Sustainability Report Card, published by the Sustainable Endowments Institute. Berea's grade placed it in the top 23% of schools nationwide, surpassed by only three schools in the Southeast.