LI worship houses aim to save energy

With Keith Mainhart holding sway over how the buildings at St. Martin of Tours are lighted, heated and cooled, energy costs for some areas of the 400-student Catholic school in Amityville have fallen -- by two-thirds in the space reserved for meetings, assemblies and special events.

"We had a big social-conference room that used to be lit with 100-watt conventional incandescent bulbs, and the lighting was terrible," Mainhart said of the room with the dramatic energy decrease. "All that energy was being used up, and you still couldn't see."

Persuaded partly by his master's degree in environmental policy and stint with an environmental-advocacy group, parish leaders let Mainhart, St. Martin's director of parish outreach since 2005, oversee a lighting redesign of the room. At his urging, they also opted for a costlier but more efficient natural-gas boiler and to replace the old incandescent bulbs marking the entrance and exits to the Amityville campus with LED bulbs.

It didn't hurt that the Vatican itself -- outfitted with solar panels and other Earth-friendly innovations -- had been lessening its carbon footprint and ramping up its Bible-based edicts on proper environmental stewardship, said Mainhart, co-chair of Long Island Interfaith Environment Network and co-founder of the Long Islandwide "Greening Your Place of Worship" project.

"We've looked into the possibility of getting solar panels on the school," Mainhart said, adding that the school is one of only a handful on Long Island with an Environmental Protection Agency Energy Star rating. "We want to be a beacon of light, so people can do many of the things we've done, things that are really not terribly exotic."

The greening project was launched in 2007 and is co-sponsored by Molloy College's Sustainability Institute. It aims to make churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship models of energy efficiency. The campaign is designed to help religious organizations save money, but its more fundamental goal is spreading the gospel that the Creation needs humankind's care.

Since the greening project began, 215 houses of worship have ordered free energy audits from the Long Island Power Authority. The audits are tailored for the deep pocketed and those on more modest budgets, said Walter Hoefer, LIPA's director of municipal and school programs, which also covers religious and other nonprofit institutions. There's the "walk-through" audit, which catches easy-to-change energy guzzlers such as incandescent light bulbs. The computer-based "comprehensive audit" is an analysis of everything from roofing and appliances to heating and ventilating systems and windows.

For its part, the project will host its fourth annual "Greening the Faith" conference in September, delivering much the same information it conveys during smaller, informational meetings at houses of worship. The most recent was at Aquebogue's Old Steeple Community Church.

Since September, Beth Fiteni, chairwoman of the environment network, and Mainhart have been surveying houses of worship to get a precise tally of who's participating and how.

So far, environmental upgrades by the congregations represented on the greening project's 10-member steering committee include solar air-conditioning systems, state-of-the-art boilers and environmentally minded architectural planning like that being done for a classroom building at the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury.

"We also have an organic vegetable garden," said Habeeb Ahmed, president of the center, which donates half its yield to the Interfaith Nutrition Network of food pantries and soup kitchens.

"We try to cover the moral and ethical aspects of this . . . because it affects the environment and human life," said Fiteni, also the Sustainability Institute's program director. "We believe this program is a win-win."