Yale Unveils Detailed 3-Year Sustainability Plan

According to a three-year “sustainability strategic plan” released on Monday, Yale University hopes to make its buildings greener, reduce its energy consumption, recycle more of its waste, persuade staff members and students to drive less, and take a number of other steps aimed at making the institution a leader in sustainability. The plan builds on Yale’s commitment to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 43 percent below their 2005 levels by 2020.

Conceived by a task force comprising nine committees, the plan sets a number of goals for departments throughout the university. Among them:

• Design new buildings and renovation projects at least to LEED gold standards.
• Require all project managers and planners to earn certification as LEED green associates.
• Increase the university’s recycling rate by 25 percent, and reduce the amount of solid waste sent to landfills by 25 percent.
• Cap the number of campus parking places at the current level.
• Experiment with telecommuting.
• Limit the number of trucks delivering food by consolidating purchasing.
• Compost all pre- and post-consumer food waste generated in dining facilities.
• Seek green-lab certification for all university labs, and reduce lab-related waste and energy use.
• Develop a university-wide stormwater-management plan.
• Reduce campus energy consumption by 15 percent below the 2005 level.
• Use more energy from on- and off-campus renewable sources.
• Reduce energy use at individual workstations by 40 percent.
• Reduce paper consumption by 25 percent.
• Use green cleaning products in all university buildings, and reduce the use of chemicals in cleaning and maintenance.

Those are only highlights of the plan, which goes into much more detail. And not all of the goals seem particularly challenging. For instance, the plan calls for reducing the number of university commuters who drive to the campus by themselves by only 1 to 3 percent.

And it calls on the food service to make sure that 40 percent of food purchases meet at least one out of  four sustainability criteria—being local (produced within 300 miles of New Haven); “eco-sensitive”; humane; or fair. Requiring that only 40 percent of purchases meet such a standard after three years doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.

Still, the plan lays out achievable short-term goals for staff and faculty members and students across the campus, rather than offering platitudes that wouldn’t mean much to most people. It will be interesting to see how well it succeeds.