Academic Movers Q&A: Nardia Cumberbatch on Earning the Sustainable Library Certification

Nardia Cumberbatch, librarian at Florida’s Valencia College, was named a 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her work in helping the college achieve the Sustainable Library Certification Program, the second academic library in the country and the first library in Florida to have done so. We recently spoke with Cumberbatch about what it took to earn that certification and its resulting impact.

Nardia Cumberbatch head shotNardia Cumberbatch, librarian at Florida’s Valencia College, was named a 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her work in helping the college achieve the Sustainable Library Certification Program (SLCP), the second academic library in the country and the first library in Florida to have done so. We recently spoke with Cumberbatch about what it took to earn that certification and its resulting impact.

LJ: What inspired you to begin the SLCP process?

Nardia Cumberbatch: I’ve been at Valencia for about 10 and a half years. Probably a month in, I joined my campus’s sustainability committee, and that kickstarted the work. Valencia does a lot, and they have a lot of sustainable goals. Because I was part of the sustainable leadership team, our director of sustainability sent me the press release from Clarkson when they achieved the SCLP. I investigated it to see what it would be like if Valencia joined. So it was definitely a natural progression of things I was doing.

What was the process of attaining certification like?

The first step in the certification process was getting buy-in. That took about three months and was the longest part of our process, because it was right after we came out of the pandemic. We were just getting back on campus, so our deans and leaders wanted to be mindful of burnout and workload. As the director of sustainability and myself were doing the process of buy-in, we looked at what work people were already doing that would meet some of the program’s criteria. We thought, let’s build on or tweak the work we’re already doing.

Our libraries have acted as pilot areas for different programs for the Office of Sustainability. One initiative came from observing that students would buy a plastic card to print things. I remember going to another institution that uses the same print machines, and the students there used their IDs. A member of our staff investigated it, because our students were constantly losing their print cards. Of course, because it’s a plastic card, there’s no name on it. We looked at that from the standpoint of sustainability and saw it was a waste of plastic cards when they could use their ID cards. Yes, the ID card is plastic, but let’s stick to one thing! Their name is associated with it, so if they lose it, they don’t lose funds. It actually saved our college money because, as an institution, we lose money on those cards constantly.

How long did the certification process take?

We did it fairly quickly, in a year. The reason we did it so quickly is because our team was made up consistently of three librarians, including myself, and our director of sustainability was part of our core team for the first four months. Because of that, we knew who to contact in the library. For example, if we were going to do the energy audit, who might help us? It might be contacting members of grounds to look at what kind of trees are around our institution, things like that.

Different librarians and staff members came in at different points. I like to say they came in as it aligned with their workload and their work tasks and interests. Which is also a kind of sustainability issue too. Getting staff buy-in means you have to work with them and acknowledge their other commitments.

Tell us about other initiatives you did for the certification.

When we did the waste audit, we did it with an anthropology class. We could do it by ourselves, but there was a professor interested in a garbology study through our sustainability committee at the time, and I knew her. I said, “Let’s partner on this. Your students want a hands-on opportunity to study human practices and how they integrate with sustainability.” We worked with our facilities and custodial team, instead of it coming out of the library budget. They were excited about the project and provided us with tarps, gloves, the resources. I like to be clear that our institution does some waste audits, but not specifically for the library. This was our opportunity to look at behavior in the library, and what we found there was aspirational recycling [also known as “wishcycling”—the practice of putting things in a recycling bin in the hopes that they will be recyclable, when it’s not likely they are]. We restructured the recycling bins and put bigger labels on them. I didn’t see a drop in the aspirational recycling by students, so we’d need to have more on-campus events and programs guiding them through that process. But it’s an example of the work in progress.

What things are you thinking of doing going forward, now that you’ve been certified?

Sustainability is an ongoing process. One of the things the library started in November 2023, when library employees were purchasing menstruation products and had some on hand, was chatting about making it a college-wide library effort. We also have a pantry on campus where students can get items they need, such as these products, so we put up QR codes around library bathrooms asking students if they’ve ever skipped school or gone home early because they didn’t have access to those products at a time of urgent need.

There was a need. So we had college-wide donation drives and asked people to green it up by giving us products with low or lower plastic content, things like menstrual cups. One of our student development folks saw the QR sign and loved it. Instead of them just giving away an entire pack of pads, now they break them up into smaller pieces so students can just take what they need that day. Two libraries out of our seven donate their items to the pantry because they’re in the same building as the pantry. Five of our campuses keep pads and tampons in the library.

I and some of the other librarians are going to the different campuses and doing what we call skillshops. They’re workshops related to life skills. We do one called “Greening Your Period.” We talk about the global issue of plastic waste that menstruation products cause. We inform them about people in Florida who might not have access to these resources, and about the finances of saving money when you buy period products. We talk about buying in bulk and that buying with a friend can help you save. Then we introduce the concept of, “let’s green it”—let’s think about, if you’re using this many pads, what happens if you buy a greener alternative? At the end of the program, we have samples: a regular plastic pad, a reduced-plastic pad, and a plastic-free one. We’ve got plastic and plastic-free tampons. And we have cups, because most aren’t going to spend $34 on a cup if they’ve never even touched or seen one. They get to touch and feel the cup.

On my personal budget and some of my colleagues’ personal budget, we bought some samples to give them to take home. Even if, in each cycle, you reduce your use by one item, it has a huge effect overall.

What advice would you have for other academic libraries interested in working on the SLCP?

I’d say don’t use our timeline to scare you. Our timeline was our timeline. It was because our institution was dedicated to sustainability already. What we needed to look at was the library’s place in the process. We might have had a stronger starting point than other institutions. And there’s nothing wrong with a longer timeline, because you choose the timeline. You could take two to three years, which is on average how long it takes. It could take five years.

I think one thing to look at is, how does the sustainability certification align with your institution’s goals? How does what the certification is asking you to do make it align? Also, there are required elements and recommended ones. We didn’t do all of the recommended ones. For one thing, we have such a high transient student population. For us, I didn’t think it was feasible to have a student advisory board when sometimes they last a year, maybe longer. That wasn’t an option for us, but for a university, especially those with on-campus housing, that might be an excellent opportunity.

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