Greenest Universities: UCD ranked #4

My alma mater – the University of California, Davis - was just ranked #4 by the Princeton Review as one of the greenest colleges in the United States. Go Ags!!

Bike racks on UCD campus

The Princeton Review, in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council evaluated aspects of the campus including how much of their budget was spent on local or organic food, what campus transportation alternatives were offered, the amount of the school budget spent on green cleaning products, and how much of the total energy used on campus comes from renewable energy resources. In the UCD case, it appears that the locally grown produce serves in the dining commons (or DCs as we used to call them) was the top reason for Davis’s high ranking. I suspect that the bike culture that infiltrates the entire town (the UCD campus is an entirely pedestrian campus and the town was ranked the #5 friendliest city in the world to bike in) and the Unitrans bus system also had something to do with it.

The three schools that topped UCD in the rankings were UC Berkeley (#3), Stanford University (#2) and California State University – Chico (#1). Only three universities from Texas appeared on the list of 286 U.S. schools – The University of Houston, Texas Christian University, and Texas A&M at College Station. The University of Texas at Austin was not on the list, though it is unclear if this was because it was not considered a green university, or because the scope for this first run of ranking was limited.

UCD Arboretum