The award, from The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, recognized schools with environmentally friendly policies and educational efforts that penetrate all corners of the university. Those areas include the school’s infrastructure, curriculum, research and public outreach efforts.

“It’s about looking at the whole instead of looking at the parts,” said Terry Link, director of MSU’s Office of Campus Sustainability. “It’s the relationships of all the pieces.”

Bringing MSU to where it is today hasn’t been easy, Link said. It has involved holding meetings and initiating conversations with a wide spectrum of people across campus.

When sustainable solutions are reached, the struggle is worth it, Link said. Those solutions include reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses the university emits, promoting new agricultural methods, which are practiced at the MSU Student Organic Farm, and increasing recycling on campus.

Lynda Boomer, an MSU energy and environmental engineer, said the university has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2 percent.

Generating some of its electricity from biomass, studying how much electricity campus buildings use and building environmentally friendly facilities are among the other efforts the university has pursued to increase energy efficiency and sustainability, Boomer said.

Those measures helped MSU reach the lowest electrical use per square foot among Big Ten universities in 2005-06.

The award also praised the number of courses at MSU emphasizing sustainability, noting that five times more courses on the topic are available now than in 2000.

Michael Hamm, professor of sustainable agriculture at MSU, is working to develop an undergraduate specialization in sustainable agriculture, which is dedicated to preserving farmland and educating students on how to use it in an effective way, Hamm said.

Farmland is in danger of being developed because of a rising population, Hamm said. Helping small and medium-sized farms become more economically competitive could help offset development dangers.

“It’s just not about production of the food, it’s also about the processing, consumption and distribution of that food,” he said.

Students also are working to help make MSU more environmentally friendly.

Madison Hall, a forestry graduate student, led a study last spring that examined how much more material would be recycled if options increased from newspapers, white and mixed paper receptacles to aluminum cans, batteries and magazines. She found that recycling would increase.

Those results, which were compiled from one campus building, led to a more formal MSU study, encompassing six campus buildings, that could influence whether it builds a recycling plant. While that study isn’t finished yet, Hall has confidence that recycling on campus will increase in the future.

“Three years from now you’re going to see every building on campus having expanded recycling,” she said. “People are ready; they’re excited. The attitude is there.”