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.”
