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GREENER LIVING

Heroes of the environment

Written by Jerry Rice, photo by Eric Reed

The price is right
For the third year, UC Riverside students are riding Riverside Transit Agency busses for free thanks to the U-Pass program. Besides offering a no-cost alternative to driving, benefits include improved traffic conditions on streets around UCR and less competition for campus parking spaces.

The program keeps hitting new highs. In 2008, student boardings rose to 170,000 — a 140 percent increase from the year before, says Brad Weaver, RTA spokesman.

Riverside Community College and La Sierra University joined the program this academic year, and talks are underway with California Baptist University.

"This program is exposing a new group
of people to public transit, and it has the potential to convert an entire generation of students into lifelong users of public transportation," Weaver says.

Dollars and sense
There's a connection between saving money and saving the planet, and Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone has found it. The Third District representative recently compiled a 24-point plan for the county to cut expenses, and several proposals on the list also help save the environment. Among them: -- Motion detectors for office light switches.

-- Programs that turn computers off after 15 minutes of non-use.

-- Transition to paperless transactions.

Many of the proposals have broad support, but one of them is raising a stink: waterless urinals. Some people believe they cause a bathroom odor problem, but they don't, Stone insists.

Besides, the annual water savings — 45,000 gallons of water per urinal, and there are 600 of them at county facilities — can't be ignored.

"That's a lot of savings — not just in natural resources, but in expense," says Stone, who already has one in his Menifee office. "We have to look at these new technologies."

Let the sun shine
What started as a way to help offset electricity used by La Sierra University's power hungry Thaine B. Price Science Complex has grown to something much larger.

LSU biology Professor Lee Greer is leading a project that will consider multi-million-dollar bids for photovoltaic arrays that will be situated on campus.

Once installed, the hope is that the system will generate hundreds of kilowatt hours of power.

Greer and a group from the university's School of Business and Students In Free Enterprise team will be among those evaluating the proposals.

Talk about a class project.

Energy awareness doesn't stop for Greer when he leaves campus. He had solar panels and double-paned windows installed at his 1940s-era home, and he often bikes or rides a moped to work.

"As a biologist and an evolutionary biologist concerned about bio-diversity on the planet, it is an ethical concern of mine," Greer says. "It's a pocketbook issue as well."

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