Despite a 10-year effort by the EPA, colleges are not very good at reporting their sustainability efforts, especially when compared to industry, according to a study conducted by an environmental biologist at Claremont McKenna College in California.

“Scholarly institutions are marching to a different drummer,” said J. Emil Morhardt, Ph.D., director of the Roberts Environmental Center. “Industry has almost universally adopted the sustainability reporting guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), an international, industry-supported effort to specify appropriate reporting in excruciating detail for just about every conceivable aspect of environmental and social corporate activity.”

In the Center’s “2010 Sustainability Reporting of the Top 50 Liberal Arts Colleges,” Morhardt asks, “One question that might come to mind, particularly since so many colleges are now reporting, is why Williams College, which we ranked highest, only receives 40 percent of the possible points on our metric, the Pacific Sustainability Index (PSI), when the top-ranked companies receive 60 percent or more?

Even though the PSI does not map the GRI guidelines very closely, it does address most of the issues covered by GRI, many of which are hardly ever mentioned by colleges, said Morhardt.

Colleges seem not to have heard of GRI, and appear instead to be driven by reporting guides specific to colleges.

Morhardt says the GRI reporting guidelines cover a lot more ground than college specific efforts. Furthermore, students are not employees, and faculty are often treated differently than staff, so there tend to be multiple codes of conduct, different sorts of benefits, and different demographics, decreasing further the parallels with business enterprises and complicating the process of GRI-style reporting even if colleges were so inclined, said Morhardt.

He concludes that even colleges that attempt to report their sustainability, either online or in response to questionnaires, are often not very good at it. The situation is not new, either. For more than a decade, the EPA in New England has led a College & University Initiative, working to improve environmental performance at the more than 300 institutions of higher education in New England. This may help explain Williams College’s efforts, since it is located in Western Massachusetts.

The EPA’s goal has been to promote long-term, sustainable practices at colleges and universities, which grapple with a myriad of environmental issues. This can be a complex task. Colleges and universities are like small cities, performing many activities within their campus borders.

Some hazardous activities may include:
 • Operating research laboratories, auto repair facilities, and power plants;
• Treating wastewater;
• Disposing of and incinerating trash;
• Managing asbestos, hazardous waste, and grounds; and in some cases; and
• Operating medical facilities with additional environmental challenges.

Unlike the typical city, however, most colleges and universities have no central authority to coordinate their environmental practices. In addition, the environmental practices within one institution often differ between departments.

The EPA says that while its enforcement and assistance efforts succeeded in elevating environmental compliance as an issue of importance at colleges and universities, it does not appear that institutions were comprehensively improving their environmental performance. This is evidenced by the McKenna report.

While the EPA believes its enforcement activities have prompted serious efforts by colleges and universities to improve their compliance, obviously, more needs to be done. Thanks and good luck.