Harvard is cleaning up its act, and Leith Sharp has high hopes it will set a global example

The Harvard Green Campus Initiative began in 2000 with a one-year grant.

Over the past five years it has grown, in partnership with thousands of people in the university, into a $1.1 million (£630,000) business saving more than $5 million and more than 18 million kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions a year.

The initiative's business model is fundamentally entrepreneurial as it continuously develops and sells new services to departments that want to save money and reduce environmental impact.

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Most large research universities have seen greenhouse gas emissions increase steadily at a rate of about 4 per cent a year since 1990. But in the past two years a number of Harvard schools have started to reverse this trend.

Activities across Harvard include:

• a $6.5 million investment in energy conservation in existing buildings
• $180,000 to reduce energy use in labs
• building energy upgrades producing 30 per cent energy-use reductions
• a green cleaning service
• using biodiesel in all university buses
• deriving biodiesel from kitchen oil
• a 42 per cent-plus recycling rate
• subsidised public transportn improved bicycle facilities
• local and organic produce in cafeterias.

With continued effort, Harvard will become a global model of campus environmental sustainability. This will be achieved with a business-oriented entrepreneurial spirit that will prove to the world that environmental sustainability is not just right, it is also the financially viable, business-minded thing to do.

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Leith Sharp is director of the Harvard Green Campus Initiative.

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