I’d like to express my concern about UT’s policy of being “green.”
    
I casually flipped through the print edition of the Beacon a couple of days ago, reading about the grand opening of the student health center, which I’m honestly pretty excited about. More waiting rooms and better facilities and services? Great! Then I got to the section about being certified as a “green” facility, in which “recycling bins” were “placed throughout the entire building.”
    
Wait, what? Recycling bins in every room make a building green? By that calculation, the house I live in could be certified green!
   
 First, The Daily Beacon could have explained what makes a facility “green,” besides having recycling bins everywhere. I had to do a search through the UTK website to find the MAKE ORANGE GREEN site, where I again had to search until I found the U.S. department’s LEED certification document to download and read. There’s so much more to being “green” and I think it’s awesome that UT is making its new buildings meet these standards for energy use and water efficiency, among other things.
    
Second, it’s hard to swallow all this self-congratulating and back-patting when I walk down Lake Loudoun Blvd. past all the trees that have been hacked down to make the sidewalk bigger. The trees along the fence line up towards the Kingston Pike building have been cut down, too.
    
So what does that mean, UT, that you’re willing to build a new facility to certifiable standards, but not work with the “green” earth and trees that we already have around us? You’ll take the easy way out, as long as you look good doing it? I guess those new recycling bins went to the wrong spot. Might as well have them placed along Lake Loudoun Blvd.


— Gretchen Bundy is a graduate student in art. She can be reached at gbundy@utk.edu.