School Notes: School of the Environment
January/February 2008

Rainwater system to save half-million gallons of water a year

A rainwater harvesting system that is being built into Kroon Hall, the new home for the environment school, will save approximately 500,000 gallons of potable water every year and will help the building attain the highest environmental ranking given by the U.S. Green Building Council.

"The rainwater harvesting system will conserve water, contribute to better water quality, and will control the rate of runoff during a storm by detaining and slowly releasing excess storm water," said project manager Nicole Holmes. Thanks to this system, she said, "the school will be drawing less water from the city's aquifer and will not be using any drinking water for irrigation or toilets."

Rainwater that falls on Kroon Hall's roof and grounds will enter into a 24-hour recycling process that will take place in a manmade pond and a network of subterranean tanks; water that circulates through the system will be used for flushing toilets and irrigating the native flora in the two courtyards on the 3.5-acre site.

The first inch of storm water will be filtered by specially selected aquatic plants -- iris, cattails, arrowheads and lotuses -- and any rainfall over that amount will be carried by a separate pipe to a 20,000-gallon fiberglass-reinforced underground harvesting tank, which will also collect overflow from the pond and rainwater from the Kroon Hall roof. That mix will then be circulated through the pond for additional cleansing. The water stored in the harvesting tank will be diverted to a separate 940-gallon tank located in the new building's basement, where it will be filtered and disinfected for use in toilets. A hookup to a city line will provide water for drinking and washing.

"This system will pay for itself, with savings from the potable water that would have been used, within 10 years or so," said Holmes.

More developing nations gain access to scientific research

Thirty-six countries have been added to a roster of developing nations that have access to one of the world's largest collections of environmental science research online. In the past 12 months, more than 500 public institutions and local nongovernmental organizations have enrolled in a free program called Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE). Yale University, the United Nations Environment Programme, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, and more than 340 international publishers and scientific societies administer OARE, whose goal is to reduce the great disparities in scientific resources between developed and developing nations. Institutions in the program receive international scientific literature that represents 75 percent of the world's most prestigious and highly cited scientific research in the environmental sciences.

When it began in October 2006, OARE offered access to scientific literature to 70 of the world's poorest nations with a gross national income per capita below $1,250. Now the second phase of the program extends the access to 36 countries, territories, and areas with a per capita gross national income between $1,250 and $3,500. Gus Speth, dean of the environment school, said, "There is now an unprecedented opportunity to provide less-developed countries intellectual capital that we in the developed world take for granted."

Donation will fund work on environmental problems in Asia

A $2 million gift to the environment school will be used to take on the urgent issue of climate change and other pressing environmental concerns in China and surrounding countries. The gift will help create an Asia Environment Fund at F&ES, which will be used to support four core program components: research, policy, exchange, and outreach, over the next four years. Inside China, pollution is estimated to cause the premature deaths of a quarter million people each year. As coal consumption increases at an annual rate near 20 percent, what happens in China will have a profound effect on the world's ability to slow global warming. "The importance of focusing extensively on environmental issues as they relate to China cannot be overstated, both for the health of the Chinese people and the health of the planet," said Dean Gus Speth.