By SHANNON O. WELLS
In the big-picture world of sustainability planning, goals — some rather ambitious — are set and sometimes achieved in a reasonable amount of time, while others prove more challenging and elusive. While it’s important to monitor what goals are progressing as envisioned, which are moving slower, and those that are fluid or more challenging to assess, sustainability is always about forward motion.
“The work of sustainability is a journey in balancing equity, environment and economics so current and future generations can thrive. It’s not a destination,” said Aurora Sharrard, Pitt’s executive director of sustainability. “We’re always trying to be more sustainable.”
With the recent release of the 2018-22 Progress Report on Pitt’s Sustainability Plan, Sharrard is just as comfortable considering areas where goals have fallen short or become ambiguous as she is crowing about clear successes since she took on her role in 2018. The 108-page, 68-goal plan, which is now posted online, celebrates the sustainability program’s “shared achievement” of five goals alongside 43 considered “on target” or “on track,” and 19 benchmarks that are either “off-track” or “unclear.”
“And just because we have 43 goals on target or on track, many of those have end dates of 2030 or beyond that we’re still working toward really achieving on a daily basis,” she said. “So, the work never stops.”
Efforts reflected in the progress report, part of the comprehensive Plan for Pitt, actually go beyond the past five years. The University’s “sustainability journey” started in 1990, with “commitments, activities and engagement deepening and increasing over the past three decades,” its mission statement says.
In 2018, the Pitt Sustainability Plan set the University’s goals and strategies, further establishing sustainability as a core value for Pitt. Since then, students, faculty, staff and partners have made “noteworthy progress toward creating a more sustainable culture, campus and University.”
“It’s sort of like a performance update on the last five years,” Sharrard said of the report, “but the foundations of that success have been laid over the years by many employees and students. We continue to build on, evolve, enhance, broaden and deepen what they’ve built, while trying to engage more people and create more opportunities.”
The five areas of sustainability the Pitt report classifies as “Goals Achieved” include:
Energy and Emissions: Establish design standards and operational practices to achieve energy use reduction goals.
Transportation and Mobility: Achieve Silver Bicycle Friendly University status from the League of American Bicyclists by fiscal year 2020.
Engagement and Awareness: Create and deploy a comprehensive campus survey on student, staff and faculty sustainability literacy by 2020.
Water Systems: Strive toward a water-neutral campus, with a 3 percent reduction in water use by 2020 from 2017 baselines; establish design standards and operational practices to achieve water-use reduction goals.
Equity and Access: Form a task force to consider socially responsible investing, to be composed of faculty, staff, student and administration representatives.
Some goals the report classifies “on target” or “on track,” which denotes progress with “ongoing efforts required to sustain success,” include:
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Reduce greenhouse emissions campus-wide by 2030 (from 2008 baseline) toward reaching carbon neutrality by 2037.
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Produce or procure 50 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030, and 100 percent by 2037.
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Divert 25 percent of stormwater from remaining impervious surfaces to rain gardens, bioswales or rainwater harvesting tanks by 2030.
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Adhere to Pitt’s Sustainable Landscape Design Guidelines in all-new landscape designs.
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Establish procedures, policies, practices and educational tools to reduce the quantity and environmental impact of materials entering and exiting the University.
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Use the Pitt campus as a living laboratory for faculty and students to implement new ideas and study outcomes over time.
- Raise the visibility of faculty research in sustainability.
Although Sharrard is reluctant to single out specific successes in the report, she is notably pleased with Pitt’s progress in Energy and Emissions. Progress in this area, she said, has been “front and center over the past several years.”
“With our commitment to carbon neutrality, that section of the report — along with transportation and mobility, and health and well-being — really showcase the diversity of strategies we’ve been using to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all of our campuses for decades,” she said. “And including a dogged pursuit of LEED certification for buildings, local renewable energy, new commuter survey results and things like that. That’s kind of the obvious thing.”
Another successful assessment falls under the report’s Engagement and Awareness section, which reflects the Office of Sustainability’s ongoing efforts to engage with various facets of the campus.
“Not every section has the same amount of pages and information,” Sharrard noted. “And when we started writing Engagement and Awareness, things in there just kept coming, because a lot of what we’ve been working on over the past five years is communicating to different pockets and audiences within the University and our partners about everything that we’re doing on campus and developing new ways for different people to get engaged. The successes in that realm just cascaded.”
The report’s “on-track” Engagement and Awareness category goals include:
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Creation and deployment of a comprehensive campus survey on staff and faculty sustainability literacy by 2020.
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Incorporating tenets of sustainability into student programming and training staff on how to infuse the tenets into their everyday work at Pitt.
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Creation of an online sustainability education module for staff.
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Developing departmental “Green Teams.”
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Celebrating by sharing stories of Pitt’s impact as leaders on a national scale and promoting the University’s sustainability model.
“There’s a way for a first-year student to get engaged,” Sharrard said. “There’s a new way for alumni to follow along with what we’re doing in sustainability. If you’re an undergraduate student, there’s new things that you can do with student groups or to find funding or pursue (sustainability distinction credits). Things just kept coming, which is really great.”
The report is just as up front about areas that haven’t evolved as smoothly or expediently as envisioned before 2018. It defines “goals off track” as those where progress “has not advanced at the speed or approach required to meet goal or its intent.” The recommendation for these goals calls for the University and/or the Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Sustainability to “create strategies for putting goal attainment back on track or reframing (the) goal.”
These include:
Transportation and mobility: Increase active Pitt registered carpools 2 percent annually between 2018 and Fiscal Year 2030. Add one new vanpool annually between FY18 and FY30. Apply Pittsburgh 2030 District goal of 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for direct transportation by 2030 (below 2017 baseline).
Research: Develop an endowed seed-grant fund to provide greater opportunities for sustainability-focused federal grants; raise external funds for endowed chair(s) to support faculty with research expertise in sustainability.
Materials and waste: Expand food waste composting program to compost 50 percent of University food waste by 2025.
Food systems: Support a local, fair, ecologically sound and humane food system by expanding the Real Food Challenge across campus to serve 25 percent Real Food by 2025; serve 50 percent of to-go meals in reusable containers and 50 percent of to-go beverages in reusable containers by 2025.
Landscape and ecology: Replace 15 percent of lawn area with indigenous and adapted plants by 2030 (from 2017 baseline); increase tree canopy by 50 percent (from 2017 baseline).
The food waste composting program, Sharrard noted, is off track for a number of reasons, “not least of which this is food waste is not the only type of waste that we come across. We have some compostable to-go containers and things like that that are part of the campus food economy, so it’s a little bit complicated.”
On a promising note, however, “our institutional landfill recycling and compost services is actually out for bid right now,” she said. “So we’re hoping through that process that we’ll find some interesting new and innovative solutions (to) reduce overall waste-to-landfill for campus, and composting is one possible stream of diversion from landfill single-stream recycling.”
And there are other ways of recycling besides acquiring products you like and finding ways to process them at the end of their life. “We focused a lot on specialty recyclables: textile recycling, electronics, batteries, things like that, over the past several years — chemical recycling. But there continues to be more opportunity, including through avoidance, just for further embedding a culture of reuse on campus.
“We’re really trying to get people to bring their own beverages, bring their own bags, use the reusable to-go containers on campus and avoid those single-use items that are finding their way to landfill because they are not compostable or recyclable.”
While the report highlights ongoing challenges posed by modern-day consumption and consumerism trends, more than a half-century after the first Earth Day celebration, sustainability has become a household — and university campus — concept.
“Sustainability is a major attraction and retention point, not just for incoming students and their parents who are helping pay for their education, but also for faculty and staff, especially on the academic side,” Sharrard said. “We’ve made a lot of progress on integrating sustainability into courses and research and the academic experience.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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