AH, DORM LIFE: cramped space, bad food, and--what's this?--solar panels. Schools around the globe have taken to greening campus housing with innovations such as renewable energy, recycled building materials, and composting facilities. Last year 318 students at California's Pitzer College moved into a new residence hall that has rooftop gardens, solar panels, and low-flow showers and toilets. Most building materials, including lumber and metal, came from within 200 miles of the campus.

At Kentucky's Berea College, 50 to 100 students live in the Ecovillage, a group of apartments and learning facilities built around a permaculture food forest (where food grows among trees instead of on a cleared swath of land), vegetable gardens, and a wastewater-recycling system. 

Across the pond, Amsterdam's Tempohousing mods old shipping containers to make prefab temporary housing. Shipping containers? Prefab? The results are far from dreary. Two years ago the innovative recycler built a 1,000-unit student housing project from containers painted bright red, with floor-to-ceiling windows at either end.