How do you cut a whole city's air pollution? The University of North Texas in Denton is trying to find out.

"We're like a little city with 40,000 persons," said Todd Spinks, director of UNT's Office of Sustainability. "If we can have an impact on the persons who come here to learn and to work, when they go home at night or on the weekends or during the summer, they can have a much larger impact."

UNT President Gretchen M. Bataille last year signed the Presidents' Climate Commitment, through which college presidents pledge to seek "climate neutrality" in campus operations – slashing and offsetting carbon dioxide emissions enough to neutralize their effect on global warming. An action plan is due in May.

The presidents of Texas Christian University and the Dallas County Community College District's Brookhaven, Cedar Valley, Eastfield, Mountain View and Richland colleges also signed.

A first step was calculating UNT's carbon emissions. The answer: 130,000 metric tons a year of carbon dioxide or other equivalent gases, roughly the same as from a small natural gas-fired power plant. About 60 percent came from campus energy use, 30 percent from vehicles driving to campus and 10 percent from miscellaneous sources.

"We are up and running at full steam during the day when the demand for energy and water is at its greatest," Spinks said. "It provides an impetus for us to be even more conscious of how much waste we are incurring. We have our restaurants and our hotels and our offices and operations and maintenance and upkeep."

The commitment also involves green principles for new buildings. UNT's new football stadium, with construction starting in January, will aim for LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

Recycled materials used in the seating, sustainable flooring and paint, low-energy lighting and the addition of solar panels and wind turbines "should make it the greenest NCAA stadium in the country," Spinks said. "It's going to be quite an extraordinary complex when it's finished."

Randy Lee Loftis