The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor has been ranked the world’s greenest college by Grist, a major environmental news Web site.

COA was a lock to make Grist’s inaugural list of sustainable campuses, though topping it is clearly a high honor for the school. It has been a green campus since it was founded in 1969 and its students helped pass Maine’s landmark bottle-redemption bill in 1973.

Students these days are more likely to travel the world to push for action on climate change than march to Augusta, though the school still has influence in state politics. Some of the state’s leading environmental activists are alumni and the co-chair of the Legislature’s Natural Resources Committee, Ted Koffman, D-Bar Harbor, is an administrator at the school.

All COA students major in human ecology, or “the study of our relationship with our environment.” Grist also cited the fact that the school was the first to pledge that it would go carbon neutral, meaning it will reduce carbon dioxide emissions as close to zero as possible and then use offsets to cancel out the rest. More than 270 other U.S. colleges and universities – including several in Maine – have since made the pledge. In 2005, COA held its first zero-waste graduation.

No other Maine schools made Grist’s list of the top 15 schools and five runner-ups. Middlebury College in Vermont is number 2 and Earth University in Costa Rica is number 3. The University of New Hampshire made the list as a runner up.

Here is the list.

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