Not even a year old, CALS Green, Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' Energy Conservation and Sustainability Initiative, has led to faculty, staff and students in six buildings to commit to cut more than 1.2 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and saving almost $140,000 in annual energy costs.

With such success, the college is preparing to share its energy conservation techniques -- which include a building contest and an interactive, individually customizable "take action" Web tool to promote behavior changes -- with the rest of the university.

The impetus for CALS Green came from the Cornell Climate Action Plan that President David Skorton released in September 2009, which aims to make the university carbon neutral by 2050. Knowing that CALS is the largest energy consumer on campus, the college decided to put its expertise behind an initiative that would maximize energy savings by promoting "behavior" reform.

"As a college we thought that, rather than sit around and expect someone else to do something," said Lauren Chambliss, CALS Green project director and assistant director of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station (CUAES). "We had both a community that was motivated and faculty from our own departments and the College of Human Ecology next door that are already engaged in cutting-edge energy conservation research."

The goal was to create a "state-of-the-art program" to conserve energy, said Chambliss, in six of their "toughest" buildings -- Bradfield, Comstock, Morrison, Plant Science, Wing and Barton Lab -- through a friendly competition among the buildings' occupants to see which building could reduce its carbon footprint the most in one year.

Fortuitously, Susan Fussell, associate professor of communication, had previously developed a Web-based application for energy conservation called StepGreen. With help from Cornell's Office of Energy and Sustainability, the CALS Green staff adapted StepGreen for energy saving in office and lab spaces.

Each week, the some 250 registered project participants are reminded via email to record on-line their energy-saving activities in lab and office. And in July, "a 'corps' of trained energy conservation students went door-to-door to labs in the six CALS Green buildings to verify the Web-based commitments some have already made and to raise general awareness of simple modifications to cut Cornell's carbon footprint in energy-intensive labs," said Dominic Frongillo '05, who coordinates the student team.

The CALS Green website also contains such tips as how to change computer settings to save energy, how to collect compost at work or recycle supplies as well as online resources that offer easy and low-cost ways to save energy. It recently won a CASE award from the Council for Advancement in Support of Education.

The website's award-winning features include a video clip "Mindless Heating: Why We Use More Energy Than We Think," where CALS' professor Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, humorously adapts some of his tips for reducing calories from in his book "Mindless Eating" to cutting energy.

"The hope is that as we learn from this pilot project the most user-friendly, low-cost ways to motivate behavioral change, we will roll it out for the rest of campus," said Mike Hoffmann, director of CUAES, adding that other universities have expressed interest in the project as well.

As for the contest, as of July 3, Barton Lab, in Geneva, was in the lead, with Wing Hall not far behind. The "leanest and greenest" CALS building will not only win bragging rights, but a building-wide party at the end of the pilot project in November.

Paul Bennetch '12 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.