I came across this article the other day about how Vermont Colleges are aiming to be carbon neutral. I thought that this idea was great, but I wasn't sure how practical and easy it would be to make this switch. In the article I read, it spoke specifically about Green Mountain College. They will change their entire heating system that will be completed in January of 2010. They will change their current heating system, which is currently burning 260,000 gallons of number six oil per year. This heating system accounts for the 71% of the campus greenhouse gas emissions. With the new system which will be heated with wood pellets, they will use 4,900 lbs of wood chips to heat their campus. All the wood chips will come from a local source and will produced in an environmentally friendly way. The project will cost roughly 3.6 million dollars, which the college has recieved through grants and loans, but it will end up saving them $250,000 in heating costs per year. Hopefully this plan is successful and it sparks other colleges in Vermont to do the same. I had heard that all campuses were going to try to be carbon neutral, but this article was the only one I found that had a serious plan about how they were going to make it happen.