I'm on the roof of the Athletic Centre at the University of Toronto in late winter. The sun is low in the sky, yet it feels uncommonly hot, beating down on panels of dark, iridescent blue metal recently installed over the southern flank of the building.

These gleaming solar thermal panels are angled towards the sun in order to absorb the heat, transferring it to a glycol mixture flowing through tightly coiled pipes below. "When we first turned it on, the temperature rose quickly, " says building engineer Terry Orsatti. "It was way too hot to touch; the temperature can get up to 450 degrees."

This heat is then transferred to the water that flows out of the dozens of showerheads used at the Athletic Centre. "We use around half a million gallons of hot water every day," says Orsatti. These panels cut this energy use by up to 23 per cent over a year.

This project was a big win for U of T's Sustainability Office, a unit of Facilities and Services, which has been working since 2004 to integrate sustainable practices into Canada's largest University.  What makes the solar panels so significant is the fact that they were proposed by an undergraduate student. 

Ashley Taylor, now a Sustainability Coordinator at the SO, first conducted a feasibility study for the panels for an undergrad engineering course in 2006. Undergraduates now spearhead much of the work the SO currently does. 

The SO works closely with U of T's Facilities and Services to implement sustainable strategies. "They've been working for decades to implement resource conservation," says Taylor, "on top of their own initiatives, facilities staff are starting to realize the student body is a resource for ideas."

University administration has endorsed the office as a channel for students to become engaged in the process of redesigning the campus and advocating for change. "This is the most important role our office plays," says Taylor, "our office is a portal for students to access the staff on the facilities side."

Some of the ideas are decidedly more low-tech than a $500,000 array of solar panels. Work-study students at the SO have been advising the network of libraries on campus to reduce their paper consumption both for staff and students. "At Gerstein [Library] all we did was change the default setting to double-sided printing," says Taylor.  "And once the library realizes it's saving so much money on paper, there's the possibility that they could move to better [100% post-consumer recycled] paper."

For the SO, the key to causing lasting behavioural change is access to the administrators able to make changes in library policy. The SO provides a platform for concerned students to focus their efforts on policy change and social marketing campaigns that cause real change. The Gerstein Library saved 10,000 sheets of paper every month after their library campaign.

The sustainability efforts are by no means contained to the downtown campus. U of T Scarborough has been advocating for student carpooling and transit use to ease the environmental burden of a large commuting student body. Their program ecoPark gives preferential parking spaces to cars that emit less than 140 g of CO2 per km.

The U of T Mississauga campus has struck a deal with Mississauga Transit to offer U-Pass transit cards to students in exchange for a student levy. They also have a naturalization program focusing on the campus' connection to the Credit Valley watershed it is part of.

Students lie at the hearts of all these projects. ReWire is a program designed by three undergraduate students in 2005 determined to make students in residences more aware of saving electricity. They began a pilot study at Whitney Hall at University College, monitoring electricity use and taking surveys. Essentially, peer pressure caused electricity consumption to drop by 10% that year.

The group is now active at 13 residences on campus, offering workshops and toolkits for participants to educate their peers about electricity conservation. Over 75 students, staff and faculty are involved in implementing the ReWire program and tracking the results for analysis.

Down the road from the Athletic Centre, another initiative has grown into a key pillar of U of T's green infrastructure. BikeChain, a bike repair and education service started off as a student project run out of the parking garage below the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE).

It is now funded by a permanent student levy and has seen membership requests triple over the past 18 months. According to BikeChain Coordinator Toby Bowers, the volunteers and work-study students performed over 4,000 service visits last year, up 25% from the year before.

Their mandate has expanded to include workshops, free bike repair, bike rentals, and even free loaner bikes to students on a first-come-first-serve basis. Their office in the basement of the International Student Centre on St. George is bursting with bike parts and flat tires.

BikeChain espouses a bottom-up, DIY philosophy. "The administration isn't going to come banging on our door offering help," says Bowers. "It's incumbent on us to rattle some chains."

"We need to change people's mindset," he says. "Better functioning bikes makes people into life-long cyclists. We're making cycling more attractive to people as a cycling option."

At U of T it appears somebody upstairs has been listening. The optimism of Bowers, Taylor, and the staff at the Sustainability Office runs counter to the frustration many undergraduates feel when trying to put their ideas into practice. 

"It does a lot for students to have the feeling that they can affect change," says Taylor. "We're a venue for putting ideas into action."

Joseph Wilson is a freelance writer on issues of science, technology and culture and is the Executive Director of the Treehouse Group.