Environmentally-friendly products and companies are the preferred choice in campus business

Rutgers leads the way in "green" purchasing

Credit: Nick Romanenko
Purchasing Director Kevin Lyons is committed to recycling and sustainability.

Kevin Lyons’s job description – director of the universitywide purchasing department since 2005 – doesn’t begin to describe the work that he does.

“Most folks don’t think of that I do as environmental – to a lot of people, we just buy stuff,” Lyons said. “But I tie the two together.”

Lyons is one of many at Rutgers committed to making the university a leader in “green” initiatives – environmentally sound policies beneficial to the university community, New Jersey, the nation and the world. His work takes him to universities around the nation and international conferences in Latin America and northern Europe.

New Jersey has been a leader in the United States in the area of environmentally responsible business practices. State laws passed in the late 1980s – when Lyons first came to Rutgers as a buyer – compelled businesses and institutions to recycle at least 25 percent of their waste. Rutgers recycles nearly three times that amount, Lyons said, and the university has always been a few steps ahead other institutions in terms of sustainable practices.

Lyons recognizes that the items Rutgers University needs to operate – from rubber bands to rubber tires, from lab chemicals to cleaning chemicals – have to come from somewhere. Lyons wants to know everything about how the product is made, as well as the best way to reduce the product’s impact on the environment at Rutgers, in New Jersey, and on the world.

By the end of the semester, Lyons hopes to have funding in place to establish the Green Purchasing Institute at Rutgers. The organization would do formal research into a practice prevalent at Rutgers for years: incorporating “green” language into purchasing contracts.

Doing so ensures that Rutgers does business with environmentally and socially responsible corporations. “If you are just buying rubber bands, we want those rubber bands to be made with environmentally responsible products, we want some information about where they come from, and if it’s stripping rubber off trees in Brazil,” Lyons said. “We want to know what the conditions are and how the folks down there are being treated in order to make those rubber bands.” Lyons is also a research professor of supply chain environmental management on the New Brunswick Campus. The purchasing department is located in the Office of Administration and Finance.

The key to identifying environmentally and socially progressive companies is not to demand certain practices. Lyons said his flexible approach provides potential vendors with a list of environmentally responsible products and behaviors, and allows companies to be creative in identifying how they can comply. “We don’t dictate . . . They know that they want this contract with the university, so in most cases they are knocking themselves over, versus trying to figure out ways not to be environmentally responsible.”

Further, Lyons sees benefits in using Rutgers’ size and scope to convince industry to adopt green practices, even in small ways. One of the university’s most recent accomplishments was convincing Staples, Inc., to use a biodiesel fuel made of 20 percent soybean oil in company trucks making deliveries to Rutgers campuses.

Rutgers Environmental Health and Safety, Facilities Maintenance Services, Material Services, and Procurement Services worked together to ensure that all 55 diesel-fueled vehicles used at the New Brunswick Campus use B20, the soybean oil-diesel blend.

“Biodiesel can be made from various plants, or from processed food wastes such as used cooking oils,” said Richard Bankowski, manager of environmental services at Rutgers Environmental Health and Safety. “The advantages are threefold. It burns cleaner than regular diesel, it reduces our use of fossil fuels, and it is domestically produced, which helps us reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” Using B20 in place of standard diesel reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 56 tons each year.

Rutgers’ environmental expertise crosses borders

Lyons’ work has taken him from his office in the Administrative Services Building III to Asia, northern Europe, South America, and all over the country. Through his travels, Lyons researches the environmental impact of institutions, borrows the best practices from schools and governments worldwide, and shares his expertise with counterparts in other states and countries.

“A lot of my research is in South America and northern Europe . . . They just happened to be a little bit more progressive. So I did a lot of work in Bogotá, and a lot of extensive work in England, Wales, and Ireland.” In 1990, Lyons attended an international summit in Rio de Janeiro, where he connected with educators from around the world. Tufts University invited him to advise more than 120 colleges and universities on environmentally sound purchasing.

Residents of the United States have slowly awakened to the threats posed by global warming and environmental issues. One reason for the delay is that the problem is not staring most Americans in the face, Lyons said. Garbage landfills, for example, are physically far removed from most people in a country as large as the United States.

“Most people in the United States don’t see this issue, because you put the garbage out on the curb and it goes away magically,” Lyons said. “When you go to Peru, the garbage is there. People throw it out and eventually it just starts to pile up all over the place.”

In the latter half of this semester, companies will be invited to a green purchasing supplier fair, where contracted companies and potential vendors display their environmentally sensitive products. At the same time, a committee on sustainability will produce an environmental report that will become an annual practice.

“The goal is to get people at Rutgers energized about what we are doing,” Lyons said. “We’ll target the general community, legislators, other universities and colleges, as well as corporations.”