It did not include buildings/operations where the University was a tenant. Also, it did not include: Graduate Hills & Garden Apartments, ‘Graham Cracker’ Sorority houses, South Commons and ground leases.

The calculator enabled easy entry and conversion of collected data to its carbon dioxide equivalent based on global warming potential. The CACP Campus Carbon Calculator inventoried all six greenhouse gases outlined by the Kyoto treaty. It adapted protocols established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for national-level GHG accounting for use at an academic institution.

CA-CP Campus Carbon Calculator's default emissions coefficients.

The University’s Administration, in collaboration with the Office of Sustainability, reviewed potential external and on-campus options and selected the Center for Integrative Environmental Research (CIER) at the University of Maryland to conduct and coordinate the inventory. CIER brought together a team of on-campus experts to conduct the inventory. A Campus Greenhouse Gas Inventory Taskforce (GHG Taskforce), appointed by Vice President Duncan, was charged to assist in the completion of the inventory including selection of the physical boundary (i.e. organizational boundary), scope of emissions (i.e. operational boundary) and study period.

Prior to conducting the University’s inventory, the operational and organizational boundaries were clearly and rigorously defined. The rules and guidelines that constituted these boundaries were strictly followed for relevance, completeness, consistency and accuracy.

The College Park campus and two of its larger satellite programs (Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute and the Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station farms) were selected as the focus of the inventory, comprising a total of 275 buildings and representing 12.7 million square feet of building space. The most recent six fiscal years (FY 2002–2007) were chosen as the study period because of data availability. The GHG inventory scope included emissions associated with electricity and steam consumption, fuel use, traffic commuting, air travel, campus transportation, agricultural releases, solid waste management and fugitive refrigerant releases.

University Operational Boundary – Activities referred to as University GHG emissions included all those outlined in the WRI/WBCSD GHG protocol. Scope 1 emissions were associated with on-campus stationary sources, including the University co-generation plant, the University fleet (gasoline, diesel, compressed natural gas), agricultural activities (fertilizer application, manure management, enteric fermentation), and fugitive emissions from hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) from HVAC systems. Scope 2 emissions included purchased electricity. Scope 3 considered GHG emissions associated with students and faculty/staff commuting in personally-owned vehicles, air travel for university-related activities, and landfill emissions that resulted from University generated solid waste.

The off-campus activities of community members (e.g., energy consumption from student and faculty/staff off-campus housing) was outside the scope of this study. Also, upstream GHG emissions associated with the production of materials (e.g., paper), equipment (e.g., electronics), and infrastructure (e.g., construction materials) used by the University were not included. The GHG protocol (WRI/WBCSD 2004) requires organizations to account for Scopes 1 and 2, but leaves Scope 3 optional. The University of Maryland inventory included Scope 3, which means it took the broadest perspective possible under the protocol. As carbon accounting methods improve and electronic calculators become available, the scope of the campus’ GHG emissions can be expanded for future inventories.

University Organizational/Spatial Boundary –Selection of the organization/spatial boundary was based on simple guiding principles. These were:
1) only include University operations located within the state of Maryland, and
2) only include buildings owned and controlled by the University for which the University paid the electric-power bill.

This definition included the main College Park campus (i.e., facilities supported by University steam and power distribution loops), all off-campus University-owned buildings for which electricity consumption was funded by the University, the operations of the Maryland Fire & Rescue Institute (MFRI) and the Maryland Agriculture Experiment Station (MAES). The latter is a component of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and operates Research and Education Centers at eight facilities located throughout the State: Beltsville, Clarksville, College Park, Upper Marlboro, Keedysville, Poplar Hill, Salisbury and Wye.

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Quantifying the GHG emissions from commuter traffic proved to be one of the most challenging tasks.Due to a lack of transportation-related surveys, average commuting behavior (e.g. carpool, single driver, frequency of trips to campus, commuting distance) was not available. To estimate commuting’s contribution to GHG emissions, a new protocol was developed. The following assumptions were made:

For student-commuters it was assumed 2 trips/day and 160 commuting days/year based on the academic calendar for regular semesters. For faculty and staff, 2 trips/day and 215 days/year were assumed. The average distance per trip for students, faculty or staff was estimated based on the mean distance of the parking permit holder’s zipcode from College Park. Some zipcodes in the DOTS database were out-of-state indicating that some permit holders registered with their ‘home’ address. Such entries, and those in MD and VA that seemed questionable (i.e. could still fall under home address), were filtered out. To facilitate the filtration process, a criterion for a commuter address was developed. Zipcodes that were more than 50 miles or 70 minutes from campus were removed.

Metro Bus, Metro Rail, and commuter rail ridership were not included due to lack of data.

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