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Higher Ed, Lower Emissions: How Are Colleges Striving Toward Sustainability?

This article is more than 7 years old.

With recent news about flash flooding, coral bleaching, and record high temperatures in 2016, this Earth Day, it’s impossible to ignore the impact of climate change. Many global citizens may feel at a loss for how to combat a worldwide problem on a smaller, personal scale. Millennials especially so, as a generation characterized by its affinity to sustainability and concerns about global warming. As self-contained ecosystems, colleges and their students are in a unique position to tackle their emissions and cut down on waste. Hundreds of institutions nationwide have made a commitment to sustainability and it’s common, when surfing their websites, to find their ongoing green initiatives. What are colleges doing, and what challenges do they face on the road to erasing their footprint?

Carbon neutrality

Common initiatives within college sustainability programs target energy efficiency (heating and cooling systems and renewable electricity), waste management (composting and recycling) and new construction efforts (building LEED-certified structures on campus). Schools may also purchase carbon offsets in places like Patagonia, planting trees to counteract greenhouse emissions. Often, however, these singular objectives are all part of a larger goal--achieving carbon neutrality. A milestone still years away for many colleges, having a net zero carbon footprint, and net zero carbon emissions, is the holy grail of sustainability in higher ed.

The colleges to achieve this feat first were University of Minnesota, Morris, Green Mountain College (VT), College of the Atlantic (ME), and Colby College (ME). It’s important to note, though, that these institutions have student populations under 2,000 and, concurrently, have fewer buildings than larger schools. Slightly bigger colleges have deadlines for carbon neutrality quickly approaching, like Middlebury College in 2016, Bowdoin College in 2020, and Oberlin College in 2025.

Even larger schools with tens of thousands of students, like Cornell University (deadline 2035) and Syracuse University (deadline 2040), have a long way to go. Simply because more students and more infrastructure mean more emissions and energy expended.

Success and challenges

With a student population of nearly 13,000, American University in Washington, DC, has the ambitious deadline of 2020 for carbon neutrality. How are they getting there?

“Our first major achievement was to buy 100% renewable energy credits, in 2010,” says Megan Litke, director of sustainability programs at American. “Now we buy 50% because the other half comes from a new installation we worked on in North Carolina.” Starting this spring, the structure of 243,000 solar panels in the nearby state will provide electricity to American, George Washington University and its hospital.

She says the school’s other goals focus on energy efficiency in all new construction projects and achieving LEED certification in future buildings. “Some challenges inherent in older building is that you’re limited to what you can do and where there are opportunities in existing infrastructure. We’re investing now in creating energy efficiency.” She says another challenge nationwide is that colleges use natural gas for heating and hot water because there aren’t readily available new technologies. “Electricity is an easy way we can swap out fossil fuels with renewables,” says Litke.

Additionally, she says, raising awareness and reaching students isn’t a one-time job. “A challenge unique to universities is that student bodies are constantly changing and we can’t do one event and know we reached everyone. It’s an ongoing process.”

Dickinson College (PA) has the same deadline. "Our goal is to cut our emissions of greenhouse gases 25% from their 2008 level by the year 2020, and to offset the remaining emissions through actions that contribute to emission reductions by others," says Neil Leary, director of the school's center for sustainability education.

"We just completed our annual three-week campus Energy Challenge, a competition among our residence halls to see who can reduce their energy consumption by the largest percentage," he says. "Conservation is a year-round endeavor and message."