University of Cincinnati
OP-21: Water Use

For consistency's sake we have adopted a 2009 baseline across the board for all STARS operational credits, as that is the earliest year for which we have strong consistent data sets across categories.

The University of Cincinnati (UC) takes the conservation of water seriously throughout the daily operation of its buildings—as evidenced by UC’s commitment to building all its new buildings or large- scale renovations to LEED standards. In existing buildings, facility staff are given comprehensive training on detecting and fixing water leaks as soon as discovered. UC’s water conservation policies also extend to the proper maintenance of the utility plant’s chilled water and steam distribution and return systems. These utility systems utilize a vast amount of water and the proper return and reuse of this water represents an enormous ongoing savings for the campus. These building-centered water management strategies parallels additional efforts on the campus to manage storm water runoff and minimize harmful impacts to the larger Cincinnati sewer system.

In addition, annually, UC hosts a Residence Hall Conservation challenge to encourage residence hall students to compete to see which hall can conserve the most water, along with energy.

The University of Cincinnati has worked diligently to handle water in the most efficient, conservative, and multi-functional ways possible.

UC Utilities has developed and installed a means to collect process water that would otherwise be sent to the sewer system for ultimate treatment by the Metropolitan Sewer District before being released into the environment. Currently all "once-through" cooling water at the Central Utility Plant is being collected and processed for reuse by the installed system, and is projected to remove over 5 million gallons of water requiring front- and back-end treatment by Greater Cincinnati Water Works and Metropolitan Sewer District. (In addition to conserving water resources, this effort to avoiding energy-intensive water and sewer treatment is reducing CO2 required emissions by 70 tons annually! As plant water demands increase with the warmer temperatures in spring and summer this system is capable of reducing not only 300 tons of CO2 from emissions but as well over $100,000 in water treatment costs to the University.

Utilities plans to gradually extend the capability of this system to collect and process close to 70% of its roughly 30-40 million gallons of domestic water requirements. See xxx for more information.

Additional water conservation strategies are implemented campus-wide, through the use of chilled water to regulate building temperatures, harvesting water for irrigation and retention purposes, incorporating pervious hardscapes, and sustainable landscaping. UC has converted building cooling system technology to recirculating water systems.

Currently, the University has two extensive green roofs, one on the DAA addition of the DAAP complex and one on Procter Hall. The University also has the Zimmer Hall Roof Garden that functions as a green roof. The new College of Business also feature an intensive green roof. In addition to reducing the amount of stormwater runoff and lessening the probability of combined sewer overflow events, green roofs are multi-functional as they reduce the urban heat island effect, provide habitat, enhance biodiversity, reduce heating and cooling costs of buildings, and add aesthetic, rejuvenating, and biophilic qualities.

Bioswales are a form of green infrastructure that work to sequester and retain stormwater in order to reduce the possibility of combined sewer overflow events, assist with irrigation, filter out contaminants, and keep water on site. The University has a number of bioswales, most notably the Teachers-Dyer Complex courtyard and in the parking lot of the 1819 Innovation Hub.

From a purchasing perspective, it is the policy of UC facilities to install high efficiency water fixtures, where appropriate water saving technologies exist. UC has installed low-flow toilets and other fixtures wherever possible.

Note that the number of FTEs do not match what was reported in PRE-5.
That's because the waste data above is for FY21, which was disrupted due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. To account the 4 weeks out of the 42 weeks when students and faculty would normally be on campus but instead were learning/working remotely, and a good portion of the staff was also working, we've discounted our FTE figures for students, residential students and employees by 20% for the year.

UC's water usage data is compiled by manually transcribing information from hundreds of meters on several dozen accounts. This introduces the potential for a degree of human error both in transcription and in the application of boundaries and methods. With that concern in mind, staff undertook a few spot checks of the raw data, and confirmed that usage trends (annually, and longitudinally) generally conform to expectations. UC is in the process of moving to digital records for water billing, which should help provide additional data quality assurance in future reporting cycles.