By Joshua Samuel
Staff Writer
The Sustainability Office will be hosting their annual open house tour of the central plant on Oct. 17. The central plant is the building just east of the Natural Science and Mathematics building and north of parking lot seven.
“The annual tour has been going on informally for about four years now,” said Ellie Perry, Sustainability Coordinator and Assistant Energy Analyst.
Perry’s role as a sustainability coordinator is to know the different projects that have been going on and to inform students about these projects.
The central plant is actually a building. It’s a brick wall behind the NSM building that students have no reason to go inside of Perry said.
“Central plant provides 80-90 percent of all the heating and cooling on campus,” Perry said. “They take all the energy and convert it into steam, chill water, hot water and basically running that tub through all the buildings on the main floor.”
The main focus of the office of sustainability is the environmental energy on our campus Perry said.
The substantiality committee tries to have tours in October, which is sustainability month. Last year was the first time it was open to students.
“We started this last year and it was really successful. Just because it happens to fall on the actual day of Halloween so people were wearing their costumes coming into the tunnel,” said Perry.
There will be a lot of activities to do while on the tour. Some of these activities include blending your own fruit smoothies by pedaling on bikes. You can even try solar-powered popcorn. The tour lasts for 45 minutes and runs every hour or half hour said, Perry. There will be an outside picnic table with many fascinating items such as nut zero water.
“This is kind of a bucket list thing because people don’t realize there’s a quarter mile tunnel running underneath campus, Perry said. “This is the only tour you can get access to see the tunnel.”
Perry wanted to do the tour this year on Halloween but because of schedule availability, Perry decided to do tour Wednesday.
The central plant tour is on the same day as the first sustainability club meeting. The meeting will be held from 11 to 12 p.m. There will be different people who will talk to individuals about projects substantiality has to offer in hope of generating future students to join Perry said.
