Copyright © 2025 Telesto Strategy, LLC
All rights reserved
For all the environment and sustainability-focused talk on campuses, granular knowledge of what makes up a university’s footprint is often missing. From energy intensive laboratories to manicured lawns and long commutes, it can be quite complex to make sense of a university’s footprint. Yet, understanding where institutions consume the most energy, water, and waste - and generate emissions - is the first step towards being sustainable and lowering operational costs. For higher education leaders, knowing where to look and what to tackle first is critical to making meaningful progress.
Understanding the campus environmental footprint
When people speak about an environmental footprint in higher education they are often referring to four main areas: energy, emissions, water, and waste.
- Energy: For many universities, the single biggest determinant of energy use intensity (EUI) is the weather. Very cold and very hot climates require significant heating and cooling to keep building interiors at comfortable temperatures. As such, universities in milder climates tend to have EUIs which are more than 50% lower than those of peers in colder or hotter climates. Beyond weather, the energy-saving measures a university undertakes – from heat pumps and district cooling to building energy management systems and double-glazed windows – also have a significant impact on EUI. Even controlling for climatic zone, top-performing universities which actively pursue energy efficiency initiatives (including through solutions such as Odyssey) can have an EUI which is two times lower than peers.
Apart from how much energy is used, where the energy comes from is also an important consideration. Many campuses have pursued on-site renewables, including solar installations and wind turbines, but these rarely scratch the surface of what is required to power a full campus. A standard rule of thumb is it takes 5 acres of solar panels and 50 acres of wind turbines to generate 1MW of electricity. Since your typical U.S. research university requires over 20MW, it would take 100-1000 acres of space dedicated to renewables (about the same size of an entire university campus) to meet a university’s energy needs.
As a result, most universities are left to getting their energy from non-renewable on-site generation or the grid. In the case of the grid, universities – unless they pursue a power purchasing agreement – are largely beholden to the mix of generation sources that is provided by their utility provider. How the grid’s generation sources evolve over time, shifting to greener alternatives, can be quite complicated and vary considerably by location. This leads many universities to rely on solutions like Parallax, which help universities project how changes to the greening of the grid can impact their electricity-based footprint.
- Emissions: A university’s emissions can be broken into three categories:
- Scope 1: These are direct emissions from sources that are owned or controlled by the university. For many universities, this includes emissions associated with on-site electricity and steam generation, fleet vehicles, and refrigerants used in dining and laboratory facilities.
- Scope 2: These are indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, heating, and cooling consumed by the university. Depending on how universities produce their electricity, these can represent the largest share of a university’s carbon footprint.
- Scope 3: These are all other indirect emissions that occur in a university’s value chain but are not included in Scope 2 and are often outside of the university’s control, including from business travel, employee commuting, and purchased goods and services.
Water: Although not always as highly prioritized as energy and emissions, water plays a critical role in a university’s environmental footprint. With over 30% of US counties expected to be facing high or extreme water stress by 2050, water efficiency is becoming an increasingly important topic on campus. Improving water efficiency, however, requires diligent planning and execution, replacing inefficient appliances and fixtures with more efficient ones as they near end of life, detecting and addressing leaks quickly, and influencing usage behaviors.
- Waste: Due to its visibility, waste is frequently one of the first environmental issues that comes to mind on campus.
- From distribution of recycling bins to removal of single-use plastics, nearly 65% of universities have some form of waste diversion program. Furthermore, waste diversion rates (i.e., the share of solid waste that doesn’t end up in a landfill) at universities are as high as 45%, which is significantly higher than cities like New York (20%), Boston (25%), and Washington, DC (30%).
Contact Us
In this new environment, clarity, and strategy matter more than ever. If your institution is wrestling with how to adapt your sustainability efforts without losing momentum, we’d be glad to help. Contact us to talk through how your peers are navigating similar questions and what approaches are proving effective.
Our people
Andrew Alesbury
Partner, Washington DC
With a background spanning both urban planning and real estate development in the United States, Andrew supports sustainability and facilities departments across higher education institutions to develop and execute strategies which enable them to achieve their ambitions while navigating complex stakeholder environments and addressing student and faculty concerns.
Ben Vatterott
Partner, San Francisco
Ben has led sustainability and growth strategy projects for clients across the higher education and real estate ecosystems, including universities and colleges, private real estate companies, PropTech companies, and more. He supports clients on a number of strategic topics such as achieving net zero targets, embedding sustainability and emissions reduction into capital deployment, and capturing sustainable growth opportunities.
