The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, has been ranked as the nation's greenest college in 2017.
Sierra magazine’s annual “Cool Schools” ranking of higher-education institutions with the greatest commitment to sustainability placed the Maine college at the top of the list for the second year in a row.
"We see our campus as a laboratory for students to put their ideas about how the world ought to work into practice," says Heather Albert-Knopp, dean of admission at College of the Atlantic.
Sierra and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education put together the rankings each year by surveying schools about environmental practices in several categories, including food and transportation systems, water and waste management, purchasing procedures, academics, and investments.
Independent analysts sift through the data and come up with a score on a 1,000-point scale for each institution.
For 2017, Sierra received information from 239 eligible colleges.
Here are the 10 higher-education institutions that topped the 2017 Cool Schools list.
