My Findings for FY2010

For the number of students from Susan Moreno as well as www.uh.edu/ir
Full Time: 27,932
Part Time: 10,820
Summer: 14,685

For Facutly given by www.uh.edu/ir: 2,017 (total ranked + other facutly) not TAs.
For Staff given by Ann Pino from HR: 4,136 (hourly staff and monthly staff) not students workers.

Building Space given by Lillian Wanjagi: total= 10,427,720 sqft (number given for whole campus) - 565,589 sqft (research building space)= 9,862,131 sqft

Natural Gas given by Sameer K.: 418,748 MMBtu

Gasoline fleet given by Emmitt Sullivan: Gallons used of Gasoline on Campus (automobiles)
4,100 gallons a month from General Services
From January- October was 35,700 gallons
2,100 gallons a month from UHPD

Calculations:
From General Services Gasoline fleet):
35,700 gallons (given so far)+ (4,100 gal/month x 2 months (november and december))= 43,900 gallons
From UHPD:
2,100 gal/month x 12 months/yr= 25,200 gallons
TOTAL: 43,900 + 25,200= 69,100 gal/yr

Diesel Fleet (From on Campus AFC shuttle buses): 78,540 gal/yr

Other Fleet given by Tuan Tran: Number of vehicles 341.
1 Propane Cart
28 E85+ Cart
50 Electric Cart
1 Solar Cart(doesn't count)
261 automobiles (341 - the all above)

Calculations:
Estimated distance in miles per cart per year:
8 miles/day (2 miles roundtrip (google earth from general services building to the UC), estimated 4 trips a day) x 5 days/wk x 50 wks/yr= 2,000 miles/yr
Propane Carts= 1 cart x 2,000 miles/yr x 20 miles/gal (estimate)= 100 gallons/yr
E85+ Carts= 28 carts x 2,000 miles/yr x 25 miles/gal (estimate, better milage than Propane Carts)= 2,240 gallons/yr
Electric Carts= 50 carts x 2,000 miles/yr x 0.3 kWh/mile (estimated from internet)= 30,000 kWh/yr

Refrigerants and Chemicals given by Emmitt Sullivan:
1,180 lbs HFC-134a
61 lbs HFC-404a
181 lbs HCFC-22
692 lbs R-410A
2,080 lbs R-123

Fertilizer: 10,000 lbs (same every year, but ask Sameer K.), 15% Nitrogen

Electricity given by Sameer K.: 205,153,732 kWh
Steam (don't know where I obtain this, someone gave it to me): 328,425 MMBtu

Faculty and Staff Commute:
Automobile:
5656 (total facutly and staff - bus riders) x 10 miles/day (estimate) x 5 days/wk x 50 wk/yr= 14,140,000 miles/yr
Bus:
500 (estimate that take the bus) x 15 miles/day (estimate) x 5 days/wk x 50 wks/yr= 1,875,000 miles/yr
You can also find out how many facutly and staff have METRO Q-Cards and do it that way.

Student Commute:
From Bob Browand: Percent Mode of Transportation and Percent Travel Time
1.2% Bike
10.93% Carpool (counts as Car)
3.45% Bus
77.66% Car
6.79% Walk
so 88.59% actually drive

28.41% 0-20 minute commute one way
51.67% 21-40 minute commute one way
15.32% 41-60 minute commute one way
4.6% 60+ minute commute one way

Calculations:
Automobile:
For 0-20 minutes (o-0.3 hrs, average 0.15):
0.15 hrs x 25 mph x 2 trips x 34,328 (38,750 students x 88.59% actually drive) x .2841 (28.41% that it takes that amount of time to travel)= 73,144 miles
For 21-40 minutes (.31-.67 hrs, average 0.49)
0.49 hrs x 25 mph x 2 trips x 34,328 x .5167= 434,563 miles
For 41-60 minutes (.68-1 hrs, average 0.84)
.84 hrs x 25 mph x 2 trips x 34,328 x .1532= 220,880 miles
For 1+ hrs ( estimated average1.15 hrs)
1.15 hrs x 25 mph x 2 trips x 34,328 x .046= 90,797 miles
Total: 819,384 miles x 3 days/wk (average) x 32 wks/yr= 78,660,864

Bus:
1,337 (38750 x 3.45% take the bus) x 15 miles/day x 3 days/wk x 32 wks/yr= 1,925,100 miles
You can also find out how many students have METRO Q-Cards and do it that way.

Waste Water given by Sameer K.: 329,650,000 gallons aerobic central treatment system

Paper given by Stephanie Pulido stephanie@tbstx.com
201,400 lbs 0% recycled
42,600 lbs 25% recycled
4,200 lbs 50% recycled
4,200 lbs 100% recycled

That concludes my finding for the FY2010.
If you have any questions you can email me at kkwamble@uh.edu

24 November: Meeting

Attending:
Christine
Sameer
Don

Meeting Summary:
* Everyone finish his or her assigned sector summary before Dec. 18 so that we can combine all of them in our "final written report" in January
* Assigned sector (e.g. buildings, commute, study abroad, airline travel) summary written report should include: assumptions, where data is from, who sent us the data (include contact information, e.g. department, phone number, etc.), recommendations, figures (e.g. energy sources breakdown, cost of natural gas for past 3 years, etc.)
* Besides individual sector recommendations, what are our overall recommendations? (e.g. purchase offsets)
* What figures do we want to include?
* Comparison to other schools: Univ. North Texas, GA State, Univ. of Miami

Meeting: Tuesday, November 17

Writing assignments:

Sameer: electricity
Don: purchased fuel
Marc: commute
Morgan: travel card
Barbara/Christine: voucher, paper, athletic
Christine: AFC

To do:
Morgan: finish travel card calculation
Sameer: get operating and research budget

Next meeting:
Tuesday, November 24th at 11:30am

Voucher Payments: 17 November

Barbara finished calculating the total air and road travel voucher payments.

Air: 6,341,096 miles
Road: 1,091,750 miles

Inserted into calculator under "Input" CD30 for air travel and "Input" CI30 for road travel.

Meeting Minutes 10 November 2009

Attendance: Fidel, Christine, Marc, Morgan, and Barry
----------------
Christine noted that spreadsheet inputs were complete except for:
1) Some of airline travel (both from T-Cards and Vouchers).
2) Some of the Commute

Current priliminary total CO2-equivalents emitted by UH Carbon Footprint (without the above) is on the order of 250,000 tons. This is significantly higher than 2006 calculation of 150,000 tons. Increase is not surprising as FY2009 calculation is including many new sources and some of the sources have gone up with larger enrollment (i.e., commuting).
----------------
Marc entered commute for 27,000 students and 2,000 faculty and staff who purchased parking pass and then scaled it up to fulltime students (4 days per week) and part-time students (2.5 days per week). Current calc does not include summer students, this will be corrected in revised calculation.
Marc's revised commute calculations will subtracting students who live on campus and take the METRO (now that we have METRO numbers) from the commute. Marc will also scale faculty/staff commute up to 5000 people, but subtract 500 for Metro. Marc will also assume average METRO ride to UH is 10 miles for both faculty/staff and students. See Marc's posting for more about commute calculation and commute assumptions.
----------------
Morgan has completed T-CARD airline travel for all flights from IAH, now needs to do the same for HOU (Hobby). Morgan will also post all of his assumptions on blog.
----------------
Fidel pointed out that our paper consumption numbers are primarily based on purchases from Total Business Solutions which may not include specialty papers purchased by UH Printing Services. So current numbers are probably an under-estimate.

Fidel also noted that Johnny King's paper recycling numbers probably do not include paper from confidential documents shredded and recycled by "Shred-It" Corp. So our total recycled paper is probably an underestimate.
-----------------
Barry is going to start looking at comparison between new and old Carbon Footprint and comparison to other Universities.
Also curious to find out how many trips UH took to landfill in FY2009 so we can compare costs to throw out trash vs income from recycling.
-----------------
Next Meeting Tuesday November 17th at 11:30 AM, Room 229, Old Science.
---------------

Commuter Assumptions

Here are the assumptions that went into calculating the commuter footprint:

- Student Population was a base 35,000 students - 4,000 residential students, thus 31,000 students. Of this 31,000, 1,338 rode the Metro and 1,000 commuted via carpooling.

- Faculty / Staff population was assumed to be 5,000, of which 500 commuted via Metro.

- Full time students commuted 4 days a week, part time students commuted 3 days a week, and faculty and staff commuted 5 days a week. Assumed that students commuted 16 weeks each fall and spring semester for a total of 32 commuting weeks per year, while faculty and staff commuted 48 weeks per year.

- Using the registered parking pass data from Fidel Ramirez, found a distribution of total commuting origin zip codes. Went down to zip codes with only 40 commuters from each (missed only 1,300 total student driver origin zip codes), and found the distance traveled from the center of each zip code to the UH Main Campus. Then found the estimated daily one-way trip to campus and divided by the total considered population of the parking data, and found the average one-way trip was 16.87 miles.

- Since the calculator didn't consider summer school students in its student commuting body, found the total miles driven by summer school students. This was found by multiplying the summer school population by the average commute distance, getting an average total mileage driven during summer session. This total number of miles was then converted into an effective population increase (+ 3,548 students) and was added into the population listed above.

- Metro bus commuter data received from Stephanie Stephen, but seemed rather low as they only consider new accounts opened and not accounts kept open. Took the 918 student QCard holder population and doubled it, resulting in an estimate 1,838 UH Metro riders. Assumed further that 500 faculty and staff rode, and thus 1,338 students rode. Also doubled the total number of trips taken from these QCard , resulting in 143,696 (doubled from 71,848). Assumed that 75% of these trips were from students and 25% from faculty and staff, resulting in 35,924 trips per year by faculty and staff, and 107,772 trips per year from students. Dividing each total trip count by the assumed riding population and the assumed commuting weeks per year, we estimate that Metro-ridig faculty make 1.5 trips per week and Metro-riding students make 2.5 trips per week. Assumed the average Metro commute distance was 10 miles.

Metro Data

Emily,

Per your request, please see the summary below showing the total # of students, faculty and staff with registered Q Cards and total # of trips to/from UH between the dates of 9/2008 and 8/2009:

· Total # of students, faculty and staff = 919
· Total # of trips = 71,848

Please let me know if you need any additional information. Thanks again for your patience.

Have a great weekend.

Stephanie Stephens

Recyling Info from Johnnie King

Talked to Johnnie King at Green UH day and learned the following:
----------
1) UH pays $183.64 tipping fee to dump trash at the landfill. He waits until truck is fully loaded before taking it to the landfill. If we can find number of trips from FY09, then we can determine total money spent on trash to landfill and then calculate price per ton. And compare costs to recycling.

2) Typical price for recyclables over last year:
Paper $25 per ton (2000 lbs per ton)
Aluminum $0.25 to $0.30 per pound (i.e., $600 per ton)
Cardboard $30 per ton

If we take FY09 numbers for pounds of Paper, Aluminum, and Cardboard Recycled, we can calculated funds generated from recycling.

9 November 2009: AFC bus total

Mrs. Horace, AFC, 713-988-5466
Fred "Alfred" Mayfield, Fuel at AFC, 713-249-9469

# of Buses Diesel Per Bus Total (gal)
Fall 14 30 34,020
Spring 14 30 33,180
Summer 7 30 10,290
Spring Break 7 30 1,050

Total (gal) 78,540

No shuttle service on weekends and university holidays.
http://www.uh.edu/plantops/images/pts_maps/ShuttleRouteMap.pdf


Days Holidays Total Days
Fall (Aug 25-Dec 19) 85 Labor Day, TG (3) 81
Spring (Jan-May 15) 84 Spring Break (5) 79
Summer (June 1-Aug 8) 50 Independence Day 49

9 November 2009: Paper

Final count of paper from Priscilla at Today's Business Solutions:

A (0% Recycle)	161,917.94
B (25% Recycle)	21,775.26
C (50% Recycle)	6,569.10
D (75% Recycle)	0
E (100% Recycle)	49.96
Total	190,312.26

Meeting Minutes 04 November 2009

Attendance:
Morgan, Barry, Marc, Christine, Dan
---------------------
Looks like most of data is input into calculator except Airline Travel and Final Commute Data.
--------------------
Marc has data for 27,000 Student Drivers calculated using all zipcodes with more than 100 students and using all zipcodes for 2,000 Faculty/Staff.
Assuming travel to campus 4 days per week for 28 weeks, total is 115,400,000 miles driven.
Need to correct this for something closer to 37,000 students. Committee agreed to see if we could find actual enrollment numbers for FYO9 (Fall, Spring, Summer) and Actually number of Faculty + Staff, then do following:
1) Scale current driving distribution to actual numbers students each semester (minus on campus residents).
2) Assume Fulltime Students drive 4 days per week.
3) Assume Partime Students drive 2.5 days per week.
4) Assume Faculty/Staff drive 5 days per week.
2) Scale faculty staff numbers to best estimate of total faculty staff
-----------------------
Next meeting Tuesday 10 November 2009 at 11:30 AM

FY09 Personal Mileage Reimbursement 02 Nov 2009

Using data from Samantha Yurus in Carbon Calculator Spreadsheet #4. And State of Texas Personal Mileage Reimbursement Rate ($0.585 per mile for 2008, $0.55 per mile for 2009, from https://fmx.cpa.state.tx.us/fm/travel/milerate/index.php.

Broke up data into two categories:
1) UH-OUT-OF-STA MILEAGE (Acct#56109) Total Miles Driven UH Out of State Mileage: 83,740
2) UH-TX MILEAGE (Acct#56102) Total Miles Driven in UH-TX Mileage: 220,398

Sum Total Miles Driven: 304,138

AFC buses: 28 October

steve@AFCHouston.com

Hi Steve,

My name is Christine Haman, and I am a graduate student at the University of Houston and also a member of the University Carbon Footprint Team. Our group is calculating the carbon footprint of the University for fiscal year 2009 and were hoping to get some information regarding the AFC buses on campus.

For the months September 2008 through August 2009, do you know how many AFC buses are on campus? Also, how many gallons of diesel are used each day per bus?

Any information you can provide will be of great use.

Thanks!

Christine

Meeting Minutes

Fidel Reported that AFC Transport now has 17 Shuttle Buses
--------------
Barry will contact Pat Sanchez or Johnny King to find out what tipping fees are and how much UH gets for recycling.
--------------
Morgan looked at aircraft and travel spreadsheets.
Committee decided we will separate data into 3 different Tasks:
1) Barry will calculate mileage reimbursement. Best codes to use are: "Mileage TX" and "Out of State mileage".
2) Morgan will work on summing up miles flown on airline tickets purchased using T-Cards. Morgan will use same website that Barbara is already using for other airline tickets. Key is not to double count flights that we already accounted for from Athletic Department data.
3) Barbara will try to tackle travel from Vouchers. This is very difficult job as sometimes air travel is combined with many other things. Only hope is to have travel explained in the description section of Voucher. To start Barbara will focus on "56118 - Foreign Travel" and "56124 - Student Travel".
---------------
Sub-codes. Need to see if there are sub-codes for certain categories of travel or purchases. Perhaps we should have finance create new sub-codes to allow for better understanding of what is being purchased regarding UH Carbon Footprint.
--------------
New Contracts: Again, many university activities are sub-contracted out, like AFC transport. Perhaps future contracts can have a clause about providing special data needed for carbon footprint calculation. For example, new AFC contract could request estimate of total gallons purchased for UH Travel.
------------

Today's Business Solutions: Paper

Hi Christine, I also asked Priscilla for the numbers of 2009 up till 8/31 so we can calculate an average. I also asked her if the numbers listed are pounds or sales unites. I guess at least we have something to work with now : ) Barbara --- On Mon, 10/26/09, Priscilla wrote: From: Priscilla Subject: Paper Usage from TBS To: barbaraschmeitz@yahoo.com Date: Monday, October 26, 2009, 6:18 PM Good Afternoon, I apologize about the delay. I have attached the paper usage for the University of Houston for the calendar year 2008. Please review the information and let me know if you need any additional details for another time frame. Sincerely, Priscilla Luna www.tbstx.com

Landfill Tons

According to Pat the total tons of waste delivered to the landfill during FY09 was 1636 tons. Would this information from Pat suffice for our needs. Please let me know. Thank you.

Sameer

Meeting Minutes 20 October 2009

Attendance:
Sameer Kapileshwari
Don Martin
Christine Haman
Fidel Ramirez
Marc Taylor
Morgan Kauffman
Barry Lefer
Christina
--------------------------
Airline Travel:
- We have airline travel from Athletic Department added to the CA-CP Calculator. Need to add airline travel from Samantha Yurus spreadsheet. New team working on this is: Morgan K, Barbara S., Shelby L., and Barry L.
--------------------------
UH Fuel Consumption:
- Don Martin posted gallons of gasoline purchased by UH. Need to check if this is for Calendar Year or FY. Hoping to get data for FY2009.
- So far unable to find Gallons of diesel fuel purchased, but we can estimate gallons of diesel from average price of diesel over this time period (Sept 08-Aug 09).
- Hope to ask Emmet Sullivan (Health and Safety) to try to keep track of this for FY2010.
- Also heard that UH is constructing a new diesel fueling station, which should have new meters making it easier to keep track of total fuel consumption.
- We still need to contact AFC Transportation (shuttle bus contractor) to find out estimate of their fuel consumption for FY2009. Barry will try to do this.
--------------------------
Buildings:
-Some confusion over building electrical use, specifically whether numbers included "off-site" electrical use such as Energy Research Park, UH Coastal Center, etc. Christine H. is looking into this.
--------------------------
Commute
- Marc is working on this. August 2009 data (for FY2010) is much better than August 2008 data. August 2009 data has ZIP+4 for majority of records and also has make/model of vehicle for majority of Faculty/Staff (but not for students).
- Currently do not have results from optional/voluntary survey. Fidel is going to look for us.
- UH Carbon Footprint group is disappointed that we do not have a required 3 question survey for all Faculty/Staff/Student purchases of parking permits:
a) How many miles is your commute?
b) How many days to you drive to campus?
c) What is make/model of your vehicle?
-Marc is also going to ask Residential Life and Housing to number of students living on campus FY09 so we can remove this number of students from the commuting population/calculation.
-Marc may also request peoplesoft numbers for students living on campus so Parking can remove the on-campus residents from our calculation database.
--------------------------
Fertilizer:
-Sameer found out that UH purchased 250 bags or 10,000 lbs of Fertilizer last year. Fertilizer was 15% Nitrogen, 15% Phosphorus, 15% Potassium. He is going to check if it was all inorganic/synthetic (i.e., what fraction of fertilizer was organic fertilizer). This impacts the CO2 footprint of the fertilizer.
--------------------------
Landfill:
-Still looking for tons of trash UH sent to landfill in FY2009. Also wanted to know tipping fees. Sameer said that he would look into this.
--------------------------
Metro:
- Still need to know number of trips by UH faculty, staff, students for FY2009 and would be nice to starting point so we can estimate distance traveled. Hope that registered Q-Cards can do this.
- Perhaps we need figure out a better way to do this in the future.
--------------------------
Energy Research Park:
- We are concerned that we are missing the Parking, Electricity, Water, etc from ERP for FY2009.
--------------------------
Green UH Day:
Sameer suggested that we create a one-page handout of UH Carbon Footprint for Green UH Day. We may not have FY2009 report by then, but we should try to have a hand out describing how we are calculating the UH Carbon Footprint and what we found from the 2008 calculation.
--------------------------
Next Meeting: 27th October 2009, 11:30 AM, Room 229, Old Science.

Gasoline and Fertilizer

Fertilizer:

Christine:

Grounds department does use natural mulch and compost generated on campus, but all the reported (10,000lbs with 15% nitrogen) purchased fertilizer is synthetic. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you.

Sameer

Gasoline:

Don,

I have the gas numbers for Calendar year 2008, 42,654 at GSB and 25,029 at the UH Police. The total is 67,683 gallons for gas. I don't have the diesel fuel, but Sharon Davis could get for the GS Building. There are no other pumps. The other question on diesel is all the generators and what they use?

Emmett C. Sullivan

News from Samantha Yurus

Barry,
Per our conversation, the following is the information based on the finance system and SDOL

The information is provided for the purpose (UH Carbon Footprint Study) indicated in your e-mail only. SDOL information includes charges made from the September 2008 billing cycle to the August 2009 billing cycle for UH main campus (Business Unit 00730). Voucher payment information includes payments made in FY09 for UH main campus (Business Unit 00730).

Request #1: Total miles UH faculty, staff, and students travel via airplane.

Click here for Spreadsheet CARBON_FOOTPRINT_1

Travel Card Payments
A list of charges with Merchant Category Codes for Airlines and travel agencies. The destination and original cities provided by Airlines are also included in the spreadsheet. Charges by travel agencies may or may not be airfare.

Voucher Payments
A list of expenditures recorded with account 56000 (TX Public Transportation), 56101 (TX Public Transportation – Employees), 56114 (Out of State Public Transportation), 56115 (Out of State Public Transportation – Employees), 56118 (Foreign Travel), and 56124 (Student Travel). These accounts include airfare, rental car, or other transportations. Voucher backup documents would need to be reviewed to identify if the expenses are airfare or something else.

Request #2 Total miles UH faculty, staff, students travel by charter bus for athletic events, field trips, etc.

Click here for Spreadsheet CARBON_FOOTPRINT_2

Travel Card/P-Card Payments
A list of charges with Merchant Category Codes for Transportations. Expense Comments or backup documents would need to be reviewed to identify if the expenses are for bus trip or something else.

Voucher Payments
A list of expenditures recorded with account 56000 (TX Public Transportation), 56114 (Out of State Public Transportation), 56124 (Student Travel), and 56125 (Team Travel). These accounts include airfare, rental car, other transportations, etc.. Voucher backup documents would need to be reviewed to identify if the expenses are for bus trip or something else.

Request #3 Total gallons of gasoline purchased by UH for vehicle fleet, for landscaping, etc.

Please contact Sharon Davis at 3-5734 (UH Store) as we discussed.

Request #4: Total miles UH faculty/staff/students reimbursed for University Business.

Click here for Spreadsheet CARBON_FOOTPRINT_4

Voucher Payments
A list of expenditures recorded with account 56102 (TX Mileage), 56109 (Out of State Mileage), 56118 (Foreign Travel), 56124 (Student Travel). Account 56118 and 56124 include airfare, rental car, other transportations, etc. The voucher backup documents would need to be reviewed to identify if the expenses are for mileage reimbursements.

Request #5 Total amount of paper UH purchases.

All paper purchases are recorded under 53900 (office supplies). They do not have a separate account to be identified as “paper purchases”.

Top 3 Office Supply Companies in terms of dollar amount are Office Effects Inc., Laser Network Inc. Marimon Business Systems Inc. (Vouchers) and Today’s Business Solution, Marimon Business Systems Inc., and Office Depot (P-Cards).

Meeting Minutes

Attendance: Barry Lefer, Sameer Kapileshwari, Don Martin
------------------
Sameer reported on:

Water (1000s of gallons) 376,329
Water $ $1,200,141

Wastewater (1000s of gallons) 321,797
Wastewater $ $ 1,710,635

It is easy to enter wastewater into Clean Air-Cool Planet, Campus Carbon Calculator, no place to enter water use. We will use data from City of Houston to include electricity required to pump water to UH as an extra CO2 source.
--------------
Sameer is still working on Pounds of Fertilzer used on campus in FY09.
---------------
Don found that UH Police Department reports data on their monthly fuel usage to Emmit Sullivan. So Don will contact Emit to find out monthly fuel usage for Police and perhaps other UH vehicles.

Don also too photos of the police station fuel pump meters. He is not sure if units are gallons or hundreds of gallons (or something else) but he will look into this. This will be useful for next year's calculations.
----------------
Barry found out that Clean Air-Cool Planet, Campus Carbon Calculator does not require waste composition, but it is possible to customize the calculator for your unique waste composition. We are going to go with standard waste composition for now and see how this is different from results gleen from UH Dumpster Dives associated with Green UH Day (29 Oct 2009, Thursday)

Barry also talked with Envio Club and Mai Le (Student Sustainability Coordinator) about sharing results from UH Dumpster Dives.
--------------
Barry received several reports from Samantha Yurus. Please see separate posting about this.
-----------
Still need Fidel from Traffic Services to run commuting reports.
----------
Shelby Lollar from UH Enviro Club would like to help with UH Carbon Footprint Group. She hopes to attend next meeting.
---------
Next Meeting will be Tuesday October 20th at 11:30 AM, Room 229, Old Science.
----------

Christine's Updates

1. Total Research and Building Space should be emailed to Barbara today

2. Study abroad information should be received by the end of the week

3. Clarification on where to enter wastewater and water information

4. Working on contacting Office Max for FY09 paper

Paper

Correspondence from Barbara Schmeitz to Christine

Research store sold 1,390 cases of paper (10 reams in each case) in FY08.

Assumptions: 1. each ream is 5.15 lbs
2. 0% recycled
3. FY08 paper (lbs): 1,390 * 10 * 5.15lbs = 71,585

Office Max appears to be main supplier of UH paper. Barbara is contacting them to get FY09 data.

Water and Waste Water

Christine,

Following is the water and waste water information for our campus for FY09.

Water (1000s of gallons) 376,329
Water $ $1,200,141

Wastewater (1000s of gallons) 321,797
Wastewater $ $ 1,710,635

I sent follow up messages, but still do not have any further information on the fertilizer usage or the campus/research square footage. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Sameer Kapileshwari, P.E. LEED AP
Director of Utility Services
Energy Conservation and Sustainability Director

Why track paper purchases

Clean Air-Cool Planet, Campus Carbon Calculator users manual has following description of why calculator asks University (in Scope 3 of inputs) to track paper purchases each year:

"Some universities opt to include certain Scope 3 upstream emissions in their inventories, generally for the sake of allocating reductions to these sources. For example, a university might choose to include in its inventory the Scope 3 upstream emissions from producing and transporting purchased paper. If the university then instituted a policy that reduced paper use, its emissions would be proportionately reduced. It is also possible to track selected Scope 3 upstream emissions but not include them in the institution’s footprint."

This is something to discuss at our next meeting.

Meeting Minutes

Attendance: Sameer K., Don M., Marc T., Christine H., Barry L.
--------------------
Sameer repoted UH Custom Fuel Mix for Electrical Power and Christine added this to calculator:
39.1% Coal
40.1% Natural Gas
12.3% Nuclear Power
4.1% Renewable Energy
4.1% Unknown

The 4.1% was proportionally distributed to the other 4 categories.
---------------------
Sameer is working on:
1) Pounds of Fertilzer used on campus in FY09. Now we also need to track this for UH Garden.
2) Gallons of water used FY09.
3) Gallons of waste water leaving campus FY09.
---------------------
Barry is going to investigate:

1) UH Paper Purchases with help of Samantha Yurus. Also going to find out what calculator does with paper inputs. Also determine Research Store paper purchases and what departments they service.
2) Estimates of UH Trash Composition. UH EnviroClub and E. Messa have talked about some Dumpster Dives. Barry is going to UH Envrionmental Club Meeting on 07 October. But will try to find out from Emily Messa when Dumpster Dives are planned before next meeting.
3) Trips or Gallons by ATF for Campus Shuttle Buses.
--------------------
Marc and Barbara S. are going to find out:
1) Number of Students (fulltime/part-time for Fall 08, Spring 09, Summer 09), Faculty, and Staff for FY-09.
2) Sq ft of Research and Classroom Space UH reported for FY09 to TCB.
3) Tons of waste UH transported to landfill, number of trips, and tipping fees paid for FY09. Contacting Johnnie King.
4) Check with Fidel to found out status of special reports on number of parking passes F/S/Students with Zip Codes. Also get report of Residential Passes.
5) Marc will find out how many students were living on campus in FY09 Fall08/Spring09.
----------------
Christine is working on:
1) International Travel by UH Study Abroad Program. She will contact UH Office of International Studies and Programs.
2) Keeping calculator up to date.
3) Helping with Travel Calculation by Athletic Teams.
----------------
Don is going to take photos of fuel pump gauges on Campus so we will have record for next years fuel consumption calculation.
----------------
Other: Discussion of fuel use by UH research aircraft (Max Schauk) and Diesel Test Facility (Mike Harold).
---------------
Next Meeting Tuesday October 6th at 11:30 AM.

Custom Fuel Mix entered

39.1%

METRO Update

Danicel, Thanks for your help. The number of new student Q Cards is a good start. But we are also interested in the total number of UH Faculty and Staff commuting to UH.

Our final goal is to calculate the tons of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere by UH between September 2008 to August 2009. And we were hoping you could give us the information to help us determine total amount of CO2 emitted by UH faculty, staff, and students commuting to UH via the METRO. Do do were hoping to find out the following information:

-- The total number of trips to/from UH by faculty, staff, and students on METRO between 9/2008 and 8/2009.
OR
-- The total miles traveled on METRO by faculty, staff, students during UH Commute.

I realize that you may not have this data directly, but I would be interested in finding out what data you do have so that we can attempt to calculate this data.

Thanks for any information. Sincerely, Barry Lefer

>
> From: Danicel Whitaker [mailto:Danicel.Whitaker@ridemetro.org]
> Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 9:01 AM
> To: Messa, Emily
> Subject: RE: UH Carbon Footprint Project
>
> Emily,
>
> Sorry for the delay, but here are the final numbers for the U of H event, 582 – September Commuter Event and another 53 – via RideStore, a total of 635 new Q Card provided to your students.
>
> Thank you,
>
>
> Danicel Whitaker
> Deputy Director
> Revenue Division
> office: 713-439-4631

Meeting Minutes

Participants:
Christine, Sameer, Don, Darrell, Fidel, Marc, and Barry
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Christine and Sameer made progress getting the Campus Energy data into the calculator.

Don had good idea to track fuel usage by getting fuel meter reading each year.

No need to get fleet mileage data/estimates as we were able to get fuel report of $ spent on purchasing fuel from Sharon Davis. We may even be able to get gallons purchased. So far we have data from Police and Plant Ops. We may be missing some others, but T-Card or P-Card may be the way to go.

Darrell has not had any luck on METRO data.

Barry has contacted Samantha Yurus, she has agreed to run special queries to find out as much as possible regarding Airline miles, Paper Purchased, etc. Samantha is going to search T-Cards and P-Cards for major airlines. But we will need to do more digging once the reports are run. Bad news right now no electronic Travel Request forms and no easy way to find our information. Travel documents/reciepts are electronic copies of scanned paper originals.

Fidel is going to re-run the Parking Data for 2009-2010 only. He is going to give us two separate databases, one for Students and other for Faculty/Staff. He is also going to give us a separate search for Residential Students. He reminded us that majority of residential students purchase regular parking passes, so we need to think about how to correct for this. Good news is that we know # of students on campus.

We still need to also need to find the total area (sq ft) of Classroom Space, Research Space, and perhaps Residential Space. And number of Summer Students. We googled the State Coordinating Board Website and found that UH is required to report this data to the State. We found data for previous years, but not yet for 2009. I am sure we can find the person in UH Administration that has the 2009 numbers for most of this.

Barry was going to contact Samantha Yurus to request a special query on UH fertilizer purchases.

Next meeting if Tuesday September 29th at 11:30 AM, Room 229, Old Science.

Barry,

We might be able to get a reading from the counter on each pump. If so we can get an exact usage per year.

Don

email from Emily Messa

Hi Christine,

We do have some updated totals that the Solid Waste Department is going to send over. We’ll check and see if we have September-January on file. Also, Solid Waste reports two trips to the landfill per week.

Thanks!

Emily

Hi Emily and Mai,

My name is Christine Haman, and I am a graduate student working for Dr. Barry Lefer in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. We are working with Utility Services to calculate the University's carbon footprint. The 2009 Recycling Statistics we found on your website have been very helpful.

We are trying to calculate the footprint from September 1, 2008 thru August 31, 2009. I noticed your data only goes back to January 19, 2009 and does not include anything after August 7, 2009. Do you have the September 1, 2008 thru January 19, 2009 and August 8-31, 2009 recycling statistics?

Also, do you happen to know how many trips the dump trucks take to the landfill every week or where I can get the data?

Thank you for all of your work in making our campus more GREEN!

Christine

email to Samantha Yurus

Samantha,
I am part of the Sustainability Taskforce (specifically the Subcommittee on Climate and Energy) and my primary tasks as part of the taskforce is to organize a team of faculty, staff, and students to calculate the UH Carbon Footprint. We realize that we really need someone from finance to help us get the information we need.
I was hoping you might be able to help us determine the following pieces of information regard UH Purchases in the 2009 Fiscal Year:

1) Total miles UH faculty, staff, and students travel via airplane. This is a huge task, but what were were hoping is that you could give us a financial report that lists all the expenses for airline travel. Basically a summary of the UH Travel Authorizations that include an airline ticket: specifically: Departure and Arrival Airport and the number of people flying. This includes travel to conferences, athletic team travels, etc. My students and I will calculate the miles flown (and CO2 emitted) from data that you hopefully can provide.

2) Total miles UH faculty, staff, students travel by charter bus for athletic events, field trips, etc. Again, if you could just give us a report with each time UH rented/chartered a bus, we can try read description of Purchase Order and try to determine how far the bus drove (and how much CO2 this emitted).

3) Total gallons of gasoline purchased by UH for vehicle fleet, for landscaping, etc.

4) Total miles UH faculty/staff/students reimbursed for University Business. This is when UH member takes personal vehicle to attend conference, meeting, etc and asks for $0.45/mile reimbursement.

5) Total amount of paper UH purchases. We need this to calculate our paper recycling rate. We know how many pounds of paper UH recycles, but wanted to get an idea of how many cases or reams or boxes of paper UH purchases.

I am not sure if it is possible for your to calculate any of this. And I realize that I am asking for a lot of work on your part. I was hoping we could meet or talk on the phone so I can work with your to help find out what is possible to calculate with your current records.

Please let me know when is a good time for you to talk and or meet for 30 minutes over the next week.

Sincerely, Barry
-----------------

Full Name:	Sakurako Yurus
E-Mail:	syurus@uh.edu
Phone:	(713) 743-8721

Refrigerants Used

Correspondance from Sameer

Christine:

While adding information to the calculator, you will come across few columns for refrigerants used. We have bought roughly 1870lbs of HCFC-22(R22) in FY09 and 1510lbs in FY08. Would you please update the calculator with this information. Please note that lot of this refrigerant is just stored in our containers for future use as needed. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you.

Sameer

Email to Emily Messa - UH Student bus passes

Hi Darrell,

I requested this information from METRO. As soon as I receive the data, I’ll be glad to forward this onto you.

Thank you,

Emily

Emily Messa
Assistant Vice President for University Services
University of Houston
226 E. Cullen
Houston, TX 77204-2016
(832) 842-8184
eamessa@uh.edu


From: Darrell Anderson [mailto:dwanders@mail.uh.edu] Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 2009 7:38 PMTo: eamessa@uh.eduSubject: UH Carbon Footprint Project

Dear Ms. Messa,

I am currently working with Dr. Barry Lefer on a project to calculate the carbon footprint of the University of Houston main campus. I have been asked to contact you regarding student and faculty passes issued to the university by the Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority. We are entering the data into a calculation program used by other top tier universities in order to establish our total percentage contribution of carbon to the environment as compared with these other institutions.

If possible, we are interested in the most recent data; September 2008 - August 2009, as this is the calculation we are currently working toward completing. This data will help us establish what energy resources are currently being used, and can be useful as a benchmark for future measurements (better or worse).

Please feel free to contact me at any time if you have any questions.

Best Regards,

Darrell Anderson
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Science
University of Houston
713-443-4913

Parking Data Format

Here is 2009 Parking Data:

http://sites.google.com/site/uhcarbonfootprintfiles/files/uhgreenreport.xlsx?attredirects=0


Below is email from Fidel Ramirez describing data:
---
Barry,
Here's the raw data I spoke about. The query brings in all the license
plate records for a customer and then display the make, model and year
of the vehicle if available.

The data is structured so that all records for a single customer are
grouped and separated with two spaces from the next customer. My
recommendation (and it involves manual work) is to narrow it down to one
record per customer based on which entry has the most usable
information.

For example:

For customer 2051 we could go with the Mercedes since it gives us the
most information.
2051 1002953 77062-3640
2051 1002953 77062-3640
2051 1002953 77062-3640
2051 1002953 77062-3640 Ford
2051 1002953 77062-3640 Mercendes-Benz 300
2051 1002953 77062-3640
2051 1002953 77062-3640

For customer 2069, we simply remove the other entries.
2069 1002865 77061-2145
2069 1002865 77061-2145
2069 1002865 77061-2145 Kia Sorento 2007
2069 1002865 77061-2145

For customer 204346, we have the Zip code but no vehicle information so
we will need to figure out some other metric to use.
204346 1016335 77346-3269
204346 1016335 77346-3269
204346 1016335 77346-3269
204346 1016335 77346-3269

I hope this is helpful. We can discuss more at length what information
we have available in the parking system at the next meeting.
Thanks,

Fidel G Ramirez
Assistant Director
Parking & Transportation
University of Houston
fgr@uh.edu 713-743-5844

Recycling Statistics

http://www.uh.edu/af/greenUH/recycledata.htm

Email to Mai Le of Green UH

Hi Mai,

My name is Christine Haman, and I am a graduate student working for Dr. Barry Lefer in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. We are working with Utility Services to calculate the University's carbon footprint. The 2009 Recycling Statistics we found on your website have been very helpful.

We are trying to calculate the footprint from September 1, 2008 thru August 31, 2009. I noticed your data only goes back to January 19, 2009 and does not include anything after August 7, 2009. Do you have the September 1, 2008 thru January 19, 2009 and August 8-31, 2009 recycling statistics?

Also, do you happen to know how many trips the dumptrucks take to the landfill every week or where I can get the data?

Thank you for all of your work in making our campus more GREEN!

Christine

UH Carbon Footprint Meeting Notes 04 September 2009

Third meeting of UH Carbon Footprint Group

Attendance:
Barry Lefer
Sameer Kapileshwari
Donald Martin
Christine Haman
Darrell Anderson

At previous meetings committee agreed:
- S. Kapileshwari and Don Martin will take lead on Utilities and Water & Wastewater.
- B. Lefer will work on Employee (& Student) Commute, Solid Waste, Travel
- Committee will have preliminary UH Carbon Footprint Calculation for FY2009 completed by 05 November 2009.
- Committee will recruit more students and staff to help.

At today's meeting:
- B. Lefer announced that Fidel Ramirez (Assistant Director Parking and Transportation) agreed to help with Employee/Staff/Student commute calculation.
- Committee learned more about carbon footprint calculator.
- C. Haman was elected Committee Secretary with primary responsibility for keeping "master" copy of Excel Spreadsheet for the group.
- D. Anderson will contact Emily Messa to find out who to contact at Metro. So he can get data on the number of trips or number of miles traveled by Bus/Light Rail by UH Faculty, Staff, and Students for FY09.
- C. Haman will contact Pat Sanchez to get FY09 data for Solid Waste and Recycling.
- B. Lefer will create blog and find a place for us to share files.
- B. Lefer will try to find best person in UH Finance to provide us with information about airline miles traveled by UH and tons of paper purchased.
- Committee decided that we will have multiple sections for Electricity Usage data. First Round will be total electricity used by entire campus. Then we will break it down into different sectors (when possible) such as: Classroom Buildings, Lab/Science Buildings, Residential Life/Housing, etc. The purpose of tracking different sectors that UH campus changes (i.e. more housing on campus) total electricity usage may go up, but we can see why. And then calculate efficiencies, electricity usage per student, e use per resident, etc.
- Committee also recognized that we should also see "commute" go down as more residential housing comes online.

Goals for next meeting (11 September 12:30 PM):
-Everyone sign onto blog and file sharing site.
-Learn more about Clean Air-Cool Planet Carbon Footprint Calculator.
-Get in touch with your contacts.
-Bring data to next meeting to input into calculator.

Useful Links

Here is link to excel spreadsheet:

http://geossun2.geosc.uh.edu/web/blefer/UH_Carbon_Footprint/Calculator_v6.3.xls

Here are other useful links:

http://www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/toolkit/
http://www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/toolkit/inv-calculator.php

Here are links to two places we will store some files for the group:
http://geossun2.geosc.uh.edu/web/blefer/UH_Carbon_Footprint/
http://sites.google.com/site/uhcarbonfootprintfiles/files