Sustainability Practices in Recreation and Parks Management

On Wednesday, April 17 Assistant Professor, Natalia Buta presented: Sustainability Practices in Recreation and Parks Management in room 108, Lane University Center. The presentation is is part of the annual Focus Frostburg, which informs people about sustainability and climate awareness. 

Buta started her presentation by explaining to the crowd of fifteen people how individuals  in Recreation and Parks Management tries to protect the environment. The slideshow started off by informing people reasons why they should consider building with sustainability. Coming up across the black background slideshow, the words carbon reduction, improve air quality, and global warming were all important reasons why such practices should be considered.  

“The local government emphasizes the need to build with sustainability to think with air environment in mind,” Buta stated.

Most recreation facilities today are starting to think about how they can build their facility with trying to sustain the environment. A certification called LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is given to facilities who take into consideration the environment the most. Buta explained to the crowd that the LEED certification is broken down into four different point systems. The certified certification is 26-32 points, silver certification is 33-36 points, gold certification is 39-51 points,  and platinum is 52 or more points. LEED certification looks for certain requirements before awarding their certificates to facilities. Buta explained that they look for sustainable site planning, water efficiency, energy efficiency, conservation of materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovations in operations & maintenance. Buta believes that facilities need to use green cleaning products, start recycling programs, and conserve energy. 

After asking people in the audience how many of them recycled, about six out of fifteen people raised their hand. Buta feels that many people in this area do not recycle because there is no one coming to people’s door directly to pick up the recycled items. “More people would recycle if their was a program in place,” stated Buta.

Next, Buta presented a new recreation facility being built in Montgomery County, Maryland that  she recently visited called White Oak Recreation Center. When the picture of the facility came up  on the screen, all fifteen students in the audience were amazed with the way the building looked. A wide building with many glass windows and dark green outlining the building is what had the audience glued to the screen, because of how great the facility looked. 

White Oak was awarded the silver certification from LEED, because of how much they took the environment into consideration. Buta started to show different images of the building and how each is considered to be environmentally friendly. 

When describing one of the rooms in the recreation facility, Buta gets extremely excited to talk about which room was her favorite. The room is surrounded with all glass windows for people to look out of and has sensor lights installed in the ceiling. When her tour guide was showing her around the building, he tried to show how the sensor lights work. He started to jump up and down waving his hands trying to get the lights to turn on. As Buta started to describe her story of being at the facility during the presentation, she started to jump up and down waving her hands in the air to imitate how her guide was on the tour.  

After going over the whole presentation and seeing how nicely the building was being put together, Buta wanted to know how much money people thought it costed to build the facility? Some audience members shouted out a couple million dollars, while others sat and waited for answers. Buta stated, “It costed eighteen million dollars to build, but in a long term they would be saving money.”