Today’s post is brought to you by guest blogger Amye Cole:

So, what does it take to be one of the “green colleges,” anyway? There’s no shortage of buzzwords about different ways to approach global warming–green building, green initiative, offsetting the carbon footprint, etc. Many colleges are taking steps towards going green, and there are too many green universities to list. However, the following four green colleges and universities are a bit more creative in their approach.

1. In December 2007, the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, was the first college in the U.S. to actually meet the goal of carbon neutrality. Within a little over a year, this tiny college calculated its greenhouse gas emissions and invested in a greenhouse gas reduction project by the Climate Trust of Oregon to counteract 100% of its yearly emissions (about 2,500 metric tons). Almost 500 college and university presidents have committed to this goal of achieving climate neutrality, but College of the Atlantic has achieved it.

2. Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, uses a gas obtained by burning cow manure from nearby dairy farms to provide about half of the electricity of their green campus. Its reduction in greenhouse emissions is equivalent to about 750 passenger cars staying off the road for a year (about 3,500 metric tons).

3. University of Colorado Boulder was the first college to use student fees to purchase two million kilowatts of wind energy in 2000. The green campus recently purchased an additional 8.8 million kilowatts–enough to completely power three buildings.

4. Sierra Nevada College is the only liberal arts college with a green building on its campus that has a platinum-level certification by the U.S. Green Building Council. Located at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, the area receives an average of 400 inches of snow each year, so one of the many green aspects of the building is catching the melted snow and using it for the toilet water. The building was a bi-state collaborative partnership with the University of California Davis and the Desert Research Institute at the University of Nevada Reno.

Want to nominate a school we missed? Use the comments section below to tell us!