Every Tuesday afternoon, a group of eight University of Hawai'i students get together over organic food to dream up ways to make Saunders Hall a model for sustainability on the Manoa campus.

Waterless urinals, solar panels, roofs lined with native plants, recycling, worm bins — these aren't just pie-in-the-sky ideas. The students, UH officials and faculty are forging ahead on these plans, which will create a pilot "green" building on campus.

"We definitely think Hawai'i should be the leader for the world for sustainability. We think the university should be to sustainability what Johns Hopkins (University) is to medicine," said Shanah Trevenna, a UH graduate student and sustainability coordinator.

The project, "Sustainable Saunders" is an effort born of the university's recent focus on rising energy costs. The university is the second-largest consumer of electricity on O'ahu, after military services, and UH officials predict that the university's electricity bill could reach $18 million this year.

The students, who call themselves the HUB (Help Us Bridge), have been conducting extensive studies on the energy and water usage at Saunders in preparation for the conservation experiments they plan on conducting within the building.

To examine the waste stream of the building, the students put on rubber gloves and literally went Dumpster diving.

"Every day at 2 o'clock we put on gloves and went to the Dumpsters and sorted through every piece of garbage that came out of Saunders. We divided it into plastic lids for cups, chopsticks, that sort of thing, just to see what the waste stream was doing. And then we set up recycling for the first time in Saunders," Trevenna said.

A major goal of the project is to help reduce the nearly $1 million electricity bill generated by the seven-story building.

"Hopefully we can show that we can make a difference and that will encourage other parts of campus to do the same thing," said Bruce Miller, director of the UH Office of Sustainability, one of the people who came up with the idea for the project.

"If we're going to be one of the state's largest users of water, energy and other resources, we have to use it responsibly," Miller said. "We have to demonstrate that we're willing to make a commitment to do this. We cannot continue to waste energy."

Many of the changes that would take place at Saunders would involve occupants modifying their behaviors — taking the stairs instead of using elevators, turning off lights, shutting down computers, and recycling.

Trevenna predicts that if people change their energy consumption habits, that energy usage within the building could decrease by 50 percent.

Of course, there are other ways to become more sustainable: "Upgrade the air-conditioning system, install sensor lighting, put up solar panels, a green roof, occupancy sensors for the air conditioning," Trevenna suggested. All of that would cost upwards of $1.2 million.

Much of the money for the project will come from the university, donations from local businesses, energy savings from retrofits, money requested from the Legislature and the university's newfound partnerships with Hawaiian Electric Co.

As a sort of official kickoff for the project, the students have organized a networking party at Saunders Hall where sustainability experts, activists and like-minded individuals can gather and brainstorm ways to create the model green building.

Fifteen rooms across seven floors have been assigned a theme, such as water conservation and recycling, and will be plastered with paper where people can jot down their ideas on the topic. The ideas will then be formulated in a master plan to be implemented within the coming months.

"We will probably do a two- or three-year plan with a goal that each year we reduce consumption by 25 percent, 50 percent, so on," Trevenna said. "We want to be a model for the campus, and we also want to be a model for Hawai'i."

Reach Loren Moreno at lmoreno@honoluluadvertiser.com.