There’s no better place to start a discussion on sustainability than at the beginning. At SFU, Human Resources offers a monthly orientation to all the most important things every new continuing employee should know about their employer. Sustainability is one of those important things!
Every month for some years, one of our staff has presented a short talk about sustainability, sandwiched between “health and safety” and “privacy legislation.” These opportunities are a wonderful recognition of the importance SFU places on sustainability as one of the University’s six guiding principles.
I used to give a simple, straightforward talk focusing on SFU’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, our Sustainability Ambassadors program and its various campaigns, and how sustainability is everyone’s business, so get involved!
Last month, after a long hiatus, I did my first orientation and found there was a lot more to talk about than before. SFU continues, through the hard work of its Facilities Services staff, to reduce its GHG emissions despite having grown enormously in size its facilities, its student body, its research capacity and, most dramatically, the energy demands to support its IT infrastructure. Despite our efforts, SFU still pays over $1M each year in carbon taxes and to purchase carbon offsets from BC’s Pacific Carbon Trust.
And our Ancillaries group collaborated with Chartwell’s (our food service provider) to make SFU a Fair Trade Certified university, to increase the serving of locally-sourced foods, and to introduce a broad range of catering options that encourage the use of china over disposable plates, eliminate Styrofoam containers and so on. Parking Services has, meanwhile, recently installed several Electric Vehicle Charging Stations located around our Burnaby campus.
And we have initiated a large-scale pilot program to collect post-consumer organic wastes from departmental kitchens around the Burnaby campus. We expect this program to expand across SFU’s campuses in the coming year.
Sustainability is getting lots of attention on the academic side of things, too. The Beedie School of Business just announced the launch of a new collaboration with a number of major North American businesses (for instance, TD Bank, Target Stores and BC Hydro) to develop ways to embed sustainability within organizational culture.
This is just the kind of work that is essential to create culture change and it must increasingly become the conscious work of SFU and other universities. We don’t really know what a sustainable way of life in our modern world will look like, so we’re learning as we go along.
And it will be difficult work because the economic model in which we are deeply entrenched assumes both the possibility and the desirability of endless growth and consumption as the definition of “prosperity.” This model is, in other words, inherently unsustainable. I really look forward to seeing what emerges from the work done in Beedie and elsewhere to solve this conundrum.
SFU Research is also working to address major sustainability issues. Our School of Engineering is home to the Energy Systems Group, who are working on fuel cell technology, renewable power and a host of other critical issues that will help to shift our economies from their heavy reliance on burning carbon to using alternative fuel sources. This, too, will be essential while we also adjust to simply consuming less.
My message here is that “sustainability” is increasingly being recognized as everyone’s work. It may not be the heart of your work, and you may not yet see the connection between your career or area of study and “sustainability.”
But our future will be one in which those broad issues, interests, behaviours and values we now call “sustainability” will have become an integral and unquestioned aspect of virtually everyone’s work and study. It will simply be “the way things are.”
That’s becoming my main message at orientation!
