Building a Circular Campus: Consumption, Net Zero Emissions, and Environmental Justice at Barnard College

Abstract

Higher education has an opportunity to accelerate the transition to a just and circular economy, a vital part of any global response to climate change. As diverse but contained communities, campuses are in many ways microcosms of the larger world – with systems, both centralized and decentralized, for dining, purchasing, transportation, home and work life, and decision making. At the same time, colleges and universities have significant capacity to influence behaviors through teaching, research, management, and purchasing power. These characteristics create a unique opportunity to develop and test circular economy strategies, especially in the context of environmental justice. When put into practice in a campus environment, numerous intersections and synergies between social justice and circularity become apparent, along with powerful pathways for emissions reduction and changing behavior patterns. This chapter describes the pursuit of an equitable and circular campus at Barnard College: a circular campus is a holistic, systems-based framework designed to reduce emissions and waste, reduce costs, transform consumption patterns on campus, increase access and affordability for students, and support the transition to a just, sustainable economy.

1 Welcome to Your First Year Seminar: Please Wear Gloves

In the spring of 2018, a group of students gathered around a table in a small classroom tucked behind a stairwell in Milbank Hall. A blue tarp was spread out on the table, and three bags of garbage were spilled out onto the tarp. Many of the students, all first-years, were still close enough to their high school selves that they indulged in exclamations like “eew, gross!” Equipped with gloves and safety goggles, however, even the most squeamish eventually got to work methodically sorting and weighing the contents of the bags, which had been destined for landfill. They determined that 50% of the contents of the 67 pounds of waste could have been recycled, and 21% could have been composted. Many students seemed dismayed at the lack of basic waste sorting. One pulled a Poland Spring water bottle out of a mound of trash and exclaimed, “but this is, like, recycling 101!”

This waste audit was part of a first-year seminar called “Things and Stuff,” an examination of the origins and impacts of modern American patterns of consumption. The structure of the waste audit had been adapted from a Waste Management course taught for many years by Professor Peter Bower in Barnard’s Environmental Science department. Professor Bower’s course examined waste systems on campus and in New York City, and involved, quite literally, digging deep into the trash at Barnard. The results reported by Professor Bower’s students corroborated the slightly more creative interpretations of the first-year seminar students, putting specific numbers to what can be casually observed with a glance in almost any waste receptacle on campus: it is a poor showing, with the basic tenets of recycling 101 regularly ignored. Monthly reports from our waste hauler confirm; our average diversion rate hovers at around 21%. By comparison, zero-waste plans typically aim for a 90% diversion rate.¹

Why were our diversion rates at Barnard so consistently low? Why were our trash cans filled with compostable food and recyclable plastics, despite a campaign to redesign signs, waste-sorting tutorials offered to students, faculty, and staff, and compost bins placed in every academic building and hand-delivered to 26 offices and 3 dorms? Why did our students consistently observe members of the community walk casually up to a waste sorting station and dump an entire tray full of food, plates, and service items, unsorted, into the trash? And, as one student noted, if we can’t even recycle properly at this point in the game, what hope do we have of ever coming together to form a collective, coherent response to the full range of climate challenges?

While waste is a common entry point into sustainability learning and planning, it is also often just that – a starting point. As the students enrolled in “Things and Stuff” learned, and as demonstrated by Barnard alumna Annie Leonard in The Story of Stuff, once you start to really look at your trash you wind up pulling on a thread that quickly becomes a web – an interconnected nexus of consumption that will snare you in questions of human rights, global manufacturing, product design, human psychology, global inequality, and modern economics. As the first-year seminar students learned, our trash can speak. The students, in addition to picking through banana peels and name tag lanyards, read A History of the World in 100 Objects, in which Neil MacGregor argues that the objects that surround us tell an eloquent story of “the world for which they were made,” a story that is especially important because histories told only in words and texts are inherently less equitable, inevitably privileging literate societies (MacGregor, 2011, pp. xv–xvi). Even in the highly literate and often over-sharing world of a college campus, we can find truths in the trash that would otherwise go unsaid. When our students started examining the objects in our garbage bags, they opened a conversation not only about what we toss, but what we buy, what we allow ourselves to see and what we hide, and ultimately, what we value. As another of their seminar readings pointed out, trash provides “potent, unique clues about the inner workings of society and country that could be found nowhere else” (Humes, 2012, p. 155). For, as the students quickly saw, the problem in our trash wasn’t just a failure of “recycling 101.” Yes, we should all stop and recycle properly – but it’s not what we need to focus on. As Leonard argues, “Recycling is easy: it can be done without ever raising questions about the inherent problems with current systems of production and consumption, about the long-term sustainability of a growth-obsessed economic model, or about equitable distribution of the planet’s resources.” (Leonard, 2010, p. 233). Good design, reuse, and repair are all steps to not just better sort our waste, but to avoid creating it, and the associated emissions, in the first place. But the first step is to understand how the objects we toss – or don’t toss – connect us to each other and to the rest of the world.

When we pull on the threads in our waste, we quickly see how our consumption ties us together across the city and the globe. If we truly strive to build a campus that champions diversity and inclusion, we cannot ignore the impacts of consumption, large and small. To cite just three examples of how consumption intersects with equity and inclusion, both near and far: In a 2017 community meeting, Barnard Facilities staff reported their frustration at how people thoughtlessly tossed full plastic cups of iced coffee in the trash – the bags would often break, spilling liquid all over their feet and ankles, and creating additional work; New York City’s waste transfer stations are disproportionately located in low-income communities² – the more waste we create on campus, the more the impacts of sorting that waste falls on neighboring communities; the low prices American consumers, including on our campus, have come to expect are made possible by low wages paid in manufacturing communities around the world, largely women and people of color in the Global South.³

These intersecting impacts and inequities are revealed by our trash, and both in the first-year seminar and in our sustainability programming on campus, we strive to look for an intersectional response, one that will lead to better recycling rates, yes, but that will also support a healthy ecosystem, support our students’ access to affordable supplies, save the college money, share resources with our neighbors here in New York City, and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. For when we look at the source of all that trash on the blue tarp, we find that the actions and behavior patterns they represent are a significant source of Barnard’s overall emissions. One Poland Spring bottle is not that big a deal. But the indirect emissions from our food, our travel, our purchases, and our waste, collectively referred to as Scope 3 emissions (as distinct from Scope 1, emissions from fuel combusted on campus or Scope 2, emissions from purchased electricity), represent as much as two-thirds of Barnard’s total emissions, as we will discuss in more detail in a later section. The charts in Fig. 20.1 illustrate how significant Scope 3 emissions can be on a college campus. At left are the emissions as reported in a typical protocol, for example to the Mayor’s Carbon Challenge in New York City, where Barnard has reported for several years. Emissions from waste are the only Scope 3 category included. At right are Barnard’s total emissions with a much more comprehensive estimate of Scope 3 emissions, including travel, food, and purchased goods. These estimates are being developed with consultants from Energy Strategies, as part of Barnard’s overall pathway to net zero emissions. The Scope 3 emissions are clearly significant; more importantly, the behaviors associated with them are at the core of how we live as a community, how we spend our money, and what we value.

Fig. 20.1

Barnard Emission Sources, 2005–2020, with an estimated contribution of Scope 3 emissions at right

Given the significant impact, both local and global, of Scope 3 emissions and the social ramifications of addressing the associated behaviors, the questions posed by the garbage spilled over our seminar classroom table pointed us to a response based on principles of justice and circularity. This chapter will explore Barnard’s efforts to build a circular campus, an effort spearheaded by the Office of Sustainability and Climate Action in collaboration with multiple campus partners, including student groups, the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the Office of Community Engagement and Inclusion, Access Barnard, Finance, Academic departments, Facilities, and students. It will also discuss our work with external partners like Bloxhub, a Danish innovation hub specializing in urban sustainability, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a world leader in circularity, and Rheaply, a circularity startup. With these partners, Barnard has developed a Circular Campus framework with five main areas of focus:

• 1. Reuse and Sustainable Purchasing

• 2. Design, Construction, and Deconstruction

• 3. Waste

• 4. Food and Dining

• 5. Green Spaces

This chapter will discuss the reasoning behind our approach, share specific case studies from our campus and from other institutions, and make the case for circularity as a dual strategy to reduce environmental impact and support environmental and social justice by increasing equity, affordability, and access for students and neighboring communities. It should be noted that, at Barnard, we are just starting out on our journey towards a circular campus. We do not have all the answers on how to achieve our vision. Our goal in writing this chapter is to share our progress so far and to help other institutions realize their own goals. As such, we describe our process and provide as much “how-to” information as we can, so that others can iterate and build upon our work. At the same time, we write to learn as much as to teach. Circularity, by definition, benefits from diverse inputs, resource sharing, and community.

2 Why Circularity?

Barnard’s Circular Campus is a holistic, systems-based framework designed to reduce emissions, waste, and costs, transform consumption patterns on campus, increase access and affordability for students, and support the transition to a just, sustainable economy. This framework is helpful in connecting the dots between hundreds of seemingly disparate to-do items in a sustainability action plan, from improving diversion rates to creating healthy green spaces to supporting sustainable and ethical procurement. The framework can be integrated into and support a broader pathway to net zero emissions or carbon neutrality. It’s a way to bring together stakeholders who may operate in separate silos but whose work, in fact, is interconnected and interdependent, especially when trying to move sustainable changes through an organization. On a deeper level, building a circular campus is an opportunity to ask ourselves what we really value, and then build a pattern of consumption that reflects those values.

A circular campus is one where, yes, waste is properly sorted – and greatly reduced. But it is also a campus where resources – from textbooks to food to green spaces – are shared, within the campus and with local neighbors. It is a campus where access to those resources is as evenly distributed as possible, by leveraging social interconnectedness. It is a campus where we feel the threads that connect us, through our objects and our actions. It is a system where resources and benefits flow easily to where they are needed, and where “recycling 101” is no longer disregarded, or better yet no longer needed, because habits, norms, and cultural patterns support and reinforce sustainable and ethical purchasing, sharing, reuse, repair, and renewal.

Beyond the campus, circularity has been identified as a critical component of a global climate response. As defined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), a circular economy is a systemic approach “that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution. It is based on three principles, driven by design: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials (at their highest value), and regenerate nature.” In contrast to the “take-make-waste” linear model, a circular economy is regenerative by design and aims to gradually decouple growth from the consumption of finite resources (EMF, n.d.-a).

The problems circularity strives to address are clear: natural resource extraction and processing make up approximately 50% of total global greenhouse gas emissions (United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), 2020). Household consumption accounts for between 50% and 80% of total land, material, and water use (Ivanova et al., 2016). And yet consumption continues to grow, especially in the United States, home to 5% of the world population and responsible for 25% of global consumption (Scientific American, 2012). Globally, since 1970, the population has doubled while the use of resources has tripled, and it could double again by 2050 if business continues as usual (UNEP, 2020). This pattern of production and consumption not only creates carbon emissions, but it also contributes to habitat loss and reduced biodiversity. As the 2021 Biodiversity and Climate Change Workshop Report co-sponsored by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues, the problems of climate, biodiversity, and human behavior – i.e., consumption – cannot be separated and must be tackled holistically:

Only by considering climate and biodiversity as parts of the same complex problem, which also includes the actions and motivations and aspirations of people, can solutions be developed that avoid maladaptation and maximize the beneficial outcomes. (IPBES and IPCC, 2021)

Faced with these intertwined challenges, the EMF report “Completing the Picture” argues that circularity offers intertwined benefits, both reducing emissions and “meeting other goals such as creating more liveable cities, distributing value more widely in the economy, and spurring innovation” (EMF and Material Economics, 2019).

This concept of multi-layered, shared benefits can be deepened by an explicit and conscious utilization of an environmental justice lens as indispensable to any circular approach. Some critics have argued that the circular economy, especially as conceptualized by the global business community, has not done enough to consider inclusivity, social justice, and antiracism. Raz Godelnik, Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design – The New School, writes:

In the past this deficiency could be dismissed with arguments like ‘the circular economy would improve air quality and reduce water contamination, therefore it has an implicit social value’, but not anymore. In 2020, implicit intentions are not enough anymore – if you believe in something you need to be explicit about it on every level, from design to execution. (Godelnik, 2020)

This important critique invites us to remember that circular principles are nothing new, and can be found far beyond business models, policy think tanks, and economists’ conceptions of growth; nature has practiced circularity for thousands of years, as have human beings around the world.

In nature, waste does not really exist. Material by-products from one system are raw materials for another, creating mutually adaptive and regenerative systems that have proven successful for thousands of years. The water cycle is a large-scale example of circularity in nature: in the hydrologic cycle, the sun evaporates the water from the surface of the earth, which then rises as vapor. As the vapor continues to rise in the air, it gets cold and changes back into liquid, forming clouds, which then falls down to earth as precipitation, and is stored in oceans, lakes, glaciers, snow caps, rivers, and below the ground in aquifers. The hydrologic cycle is a continuous cycle that has no beginning or end; it allows the planet’s ecosystems to thrive and can serve as a model for human-built systems including water or resource management. On a smaller scale, biomimicry can also offer circular solutions for product design, from waterproof clothing to aerodynamics to packaging. Whether taking inspiration from the water cycle for urban planning to creating food packaging inspired by silkworms,⁴ nature can point us to circular, innovative, and collaborative solutions in the design of both products and systems.

We can also learn from cultures that have historically proven to be good stewards of nature. Robin Wall Kimmerer, professor and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes of the power of reciprocity and exchange in “The Gift of Strawberries,” demonstrating that a culture of exchange not only helps to distribute resources and share abundance but also creates and strengthens networks and relationships (Kimmerer, 2013). Based on these principles, building a circular campus becomes about more than recycling, waste, or even greenhouse gas emissions; it is about creating a more equitable and just community.

The need for this type of equitable approach is just as clear as the need for global emissions reduction. The links between environmental harm, social inequity, and extractive, linear systems have been well documented. Lisa Woynarksi (2020, p. 56), citing Theresa J. May, writes of the “lockstep between systemic social injustice and environmental lunacy. The so-called natural disaster has exposed the unnatural systems of domination buried under decades of business as usual, unearthing a white supremacist patriarchy through which racism, poverty, and environmental degradation are inseparably institutionalized.” But, just as the harms of environmental degradation are linked with inequity, so can the solutions be linked with justice:

For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were the rule…The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one… When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become. (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 31)

The principles of circularity, in very concrete ways, can help distribute benefits and resources more equitably. Garry Cooper, the founder of Rheaply, a reuse platform that Barnard recently adopted, writes that “aside from its environmental benefits, the circular economy promotes resource sharing that will make it easier (and cheaper) for people of all socioeconomic groups to obtain necessary items” (Cooper, 2020). From very different vantage points, Kimmerer and Cooper identify circularity and sharing as a way to distribute resources where they are most needed, one tangible path towards a more equitable and just pattern of consumption.

3 Why Higher Education?

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, “if US higher education expenditure were a country, it would be the 21st largest economy in the world” (EMF, 2020); an industry-wide transition to circular systems would have a significant impact in and of itself. But a single campus is much smaller – and a contained economy can also be incredibly valuable as a type of petri dish. A campus is in many ways a microcosm of the larger world, with formal and informal systems for work, living, dining, purchasing, green spaces, waste, and decision making. But unlike larger communities, colleges and universities have significant capacity to influence behaviors through teaching, research, management, and purchasing power. In addition, research and educational institutions have the capacity to experiment, including a built-in corps of people interested in pushing the boundaries of knowledge. This type of small-scale testing ground is well suited to supporting a larger transition, as the circular economy still has plenty of room to grow: the 2021 Circularity Gap Report notes that “100 billion tonnes of materials enter the global economy every year and only 8.6% is cycled back into the economy” (Circle Economy, 2021). Figures like this make Barnard’s 24% diversion rate look less discouraging.

In addition to their capacity to develop and test circular approaches as part of sustainability management, college campuses over the previous decades have been a testing ground and incubator of policies designed to support diversity, equity, and inclusion. Taffye Benson Clayton, inaugural VP and Associate Provost for Inclusion and Diversity at Auburn University, writes that “addressing educational inequities has been the focus of institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) operations for years. However, the recent triple crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic, the systemic racism in this country, and racial inequities in higher education – has prompted a clarion call for more effective strategies that will result in more equitable outcomes for underrepresented populations by placing DEI at the core of our institutional practice” (Clayton, 2021). The climate crisis presents challenges that are equally daunting and intimately linked with those cited by Clayton. As such, campuses are well positioned to link their work on DEI and climate action. The synergies of climate action and DEI, plus the capacity to pilot innovative educational and operational models make campuses an ideal testing ground for circular systems rooted in justice and inclusion.

4 Why Barnard?

So, who were those first-year students picking through the trash, and how might the particularities of the college they chose support or inhibit a circular model? Circularity as a theoretical framework may be very appealing, but as in nature, the specifics of the actual ecosystem will determine real needs and outcomes.

Barnard College is a private women’s liberal arts college located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan between 116th and 120th Streets along the west side of Broadway, beside the Hudson River and a few blocks from Central Park, on the traditional land of the Lenape people. Barnard has a total undergraduate enrollment of approximately 2700; nearly 95% of students live on campus (pre-pandemic). The College consists of 16 buildings totaling approximately 1.4 million square feet on four acres, with 251 faculty and 639 staff. Barnard is a self-sustaining entity under the Columbia University umbrella; Barnard is one of the University’s four colleges, but it is largely autonomous, with its own leadership, finances, and administration, and its own distinctive approach to historically women’s education. Barnard students can take classes, play sports and join organizations at Columbia just across the street, and Columbia students have the same opportunities at Barnard.

Within the context of American higher education, Barnard’s location and history make the college a strong candidate for taking a leading role in addressing Scope 3 emissions – the “everything else” after fuel combustion and electricity – and adopting a circular approach. As an urban campus, Barnard has close ties with Columbia University and dozens of other institutions, from near neighbors like Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Manhattan School of Music to those slightly farther afield, like Fordham, the New School, NYU, Brooklyn College, FIT, the CUNY system, plus many more organizations, from public schools to museums to community organizations. This type of rich network is ideal for building robust circular patterns – as in a thriving ecosystem, abundant resources can be moved through the urban system.

In addition, Barnard’s location in New York in some ways limits the College’s capacity to creatively and aggressively address Scope 1 and 2 emissions; Barnard is tackling these sources, but the College is not in a position to, for example, erect a large solar array on campus. Along with our neighbors, our path to electrification and net zero will be closely tied to developments in city and state energy policies. This does not mean that we will not put resources into tackling Scopes 1 and 2 emissions, but it does mean that we can be most creative and impactful, both in terms of our own emissions and in terms of advancing research and shared knowledge, by taking an innovative and aggressive approach to Scope 3 emissions and circularity.

Finally, Barnard’s history as a women’s college may provide a special logic for pursuing the historically undercounted and too often overlooked data behind Scope 3 emissions. Since the history of emissions reporting lies in many ways with cities, it is understandable that sources related to the built environment, like electricity and fuel, might be counted first. But this approach may have been misleading when we consider a community more comprehensively; carbon footprint analyses undertaken at Barnard indicate that Scope 3 emissions account for as much as two-thirds of our total footprint (see Fig. 20.1). This significant source of emissions is rooted in consumption-related behaviors – food, purchasing, travel, and other lifestyle-related activities – that are often associated with the “feminine” sphere. These emissions are, perhaps not coincidentally, often dismissed as less important in terms of climate action, despite representing a significant contribution to overall emissions. Feminist activists have criticized overly narrow climate responses as inadequate to the complexity of the problem. Bianca Pitt, the co-founder of She Changes Climate, called explicitly for more balanced gender representation at the recent COP26 conference: “Agriculture, land use, fashion and carbon removal are not on the COP agenda… If you are going to work internationally to find climate change solutions and to pressure countries for better NDCs [Nationally Determined Contributions], it’s so important that women are there to provide more lateral thinking” (Palese, 2021).

The intertwined and complex nature of Scope 3 emissions has led to a perception that solutions are difficult to undertake. Indeed, as Barnard’s case demonstrates, simply measuring these emissions and associated behaviors is challenging. Addressing these complex Scope 3 emissions and associated behaviors necessarily involve both technological solutions and collaborative, community-based approaches. As a women’s college with a strong emphasis on STEM and the humanities, Barnard is well-suited to deal with the complexity of the interplay between technological and social solutions to issues of climate, emissions, and circularity. An intersectional and complex problem rooted in the daily behaviors of an entire community cannot be solved with a top-down technocratic solution. Technology will play a role, but policies and solutions must also address behavioral and culture change. It might be possible, for example, to address Scope 1 and 2 emissions almost entirely “behind the scenes” at Barnard; the administration could theoretically change out all of our boilers, switch to renewable energy, and replace all of our light bulbs with LEDs, and most of the students and faculty would not even notice. A consistent and effective approach to questions of dining, purchasing, and travel, however, will require a blend of technological and policy-based solutions and a coordinated and socially inclusive process. A school like Barnard, with strong science and design programs, a strong commitment to social justice, and a tight-knit community, is well suited to build a comprehensive and inclusive approach to tackling Scope 3 emissions – and building the circular systems to do so.

Increasingly, campus climate action leaders are undertaking a more thorough approach to Scope 3 emissions. For example, to date, Columbia has reported only selected Scope 3 emissions. However, the University’s recently released Plan 2030 commits to a much more comprehensive assessment and reduction of Scope 3 emissions: “It is Columbia’s intention to set targets for all material sources of Scope 3 emissions that are in line with the science-based concepts and targets described above for Scope 1 and Scope 2 targets” (Columbia University, n.d.). With the climate change clock ticking loudly, we no longer have the option of undercounting a whole range of behaviors and associated emissions.

5 What, Exactly, Is a Circular Campus?

Given the specific ecosystem that is Barnard, located in New York City, what would the circular campus “holistic framework” actually look and feel like? How might it work? What will a healthy, just, and equitable circular campus be like 5 or 10 years from now?

In some ways, to imagine a circular campus, we do not have to look very far, nor do we have to imagine something entirely new. Instead, we can look to existing circular systems and imagine scaling and expanding them. The longest-standing and most familiar example is, of course, a cornerstone of educational institutions: the library. A library represents the original campus circular economy. Valuable resources are carefully stewarded and equitably shared with all members of the community. Inputs into the system (new books and tools) are regular and carefully chosen to diversify the total resource pool and enrich the intellectual life of the community. Books and equipment are repaired and maintained; Barnard repairs approximately 100 books in-house every year, and regularly services AV equipment and technology. Outputs are also made thoughtfully – in Barnard’s case, used books are sent to Better World Books or recycled whenever possible.

In addition to these existing and already largely sustainable practices, in an ideal circular campus library of the future, all inputs of new books and equipment would be sustainably and ethically sourced, and outputs carefully tracked for re-homing with local communities, repairing, or other means of maintaining value. These principles, already familiar in the case of the library, might be expanded to include construction and renovation projects which use existing materials from elsewhere on campus or nearby community projects, energy systems that create renewable energy and send surplus back to the grid, dining halls that produce zero waste and where no students go hungry, grounds and buildings designed to capture storm water, even recapturing human waste for energy or fertilizer in green spaces filled with plants that support pollinators. Technology is shared, repaired, and when eventually obsolete, sent back into a remanufacturing process. Resources are shared among students, employees, and community neighbors, including supplies, access to green spaces, and food. A circular campus in the future is one where students, faculty, and staff are taking active climate action, and sustainability, circularity, and justice are built into courses across the curriculum and the college’s systems and operations.

One salient characteristic might be things that are not there: perhaps a circular campus simply does not have the trash cans that dot our current campuses at every entry point, every lobby, every hallway. Waste haulers are no longer paid to remove a loosely differentiated mass of materials by the ton. Instead, outside vendors are contracted to redistribute a much smaller amount of materials and goods – only those that can no longer be used and reused within the campus. Purchases of new goods are extremely rare, and when undertaken, are carefully thought through in terms of sustainability and ethical production. Reuse and repair are the status quo, supported by a rich range of logistical and economic systems. Perhaps the Barnard Store no longer sells new teddy bears and mugs, but the Barnard Reuse and Repair Center restores teddy bears or resells gently used mugs for each generation of students. The vision might seem too utopian, but the models already exist all around us, in natural systems, in human social systems; we will discuss several specific campus examples later in the chapter. These circular systems do not need to be invented – they need to be seen, named, resourced, and scaled. As with our current libraries, the defining characteristic of a circular campus is based on stewarding abundant resources and distributing them widely and equitably.

6 Barnard’s Circular Campus Framework: Beyond the Trash

In some ways, our circular journey started in the trash, with our students. It was greatly accelerated by two studies indicating that as much as two-thirds of our total campus emissions came from Scope 3-related behaviors. Through student surveys, we knew that students were struggling to get access to materials for their classes and even dropping out of their majors for not being able to afford specific materials. And every day, the newspapers told us about the inequitable impacts of consumption and climate change on women and people of color around the world. We had seen the importance of grass-roots circular systems in addressing student needs or operational challenges and began to take steps to formalize those systems and expand our understanding of the potential areas of impact.

In 2021, we partnered with Bloxhub, a Danish urban sustainability hub, to further develop the circular principles we had been working on since 2017. Bloxhub members (usually design or architecture firms) and Barnard faculty and staff came together in a series of workshops to identify the challenges, opportunities, and guiding principles for our circular campus, defined as having five main areas of focus: Reuse and Sustainable Purchasing; Design, Construction, and Deconstruction; Waste; Food and Dining; and Green Spaces. The workshops focused on the first three main areas and identified a series of guiding principles and next steps for each area. Creating these principles allowed us to think through, articulate, and discuss internally our current priorities and how the college can achieve them. It allowed us to identify our pain points and translate them into feasible initiatives that foster circularity, equity, and access.

As we zoomed in and out of these areas of focus, we became more aware of the connections and cycles that emerge from these systems. We started to look for what Donella Meadows (1999) calls leverage points or “places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.” For example, centralizing the college’s purchases, which Barnard did many years ago, emerged as one potential strategy for supporting sustainable and ethical purchasing. The transition to Workday will streamline purchasing and expense reports, and workshop participants felt that, alongside this new management system, returning to a more centralized process would allow the College to steer users to preferred vendors, like BIPOC-owned local businesses, or reuse on a platform called Rheaply, a partnership we’ll discuss in depth later in the chapter. In addition, consolidating purchases significantly reduces costs, waste, and emissions. Other ideas that emerged from the Bloxhub/Barnard workshops also pointed towards supporting more thoughtful end-to-end decision-making, from providing contractors with sustainability guidelines before projects begin, to starting plants for the grounds from seeds grown in our greenhouse, rather than purchasing seedlings from an external nursery. Over and over again, workshop participants sought to find ways to curb the flow of unnecessary consumption on campus and create systems that would support a more equitable and circular culture of decision-making. A series of three case studies illustrate the intersections between circularity, emissions reduction, and equity.

7 Three Barnard Case Studies: Reuse, Renovation, and Reallocation

Like many institutions, Barnard has long had an informal circular economy for office supplies, furniture, textbooks, mini-fridges, and all the various accoutrements of college life. From cardboard boxes in the hall labeled “free books” to a lively student marketplace on Facebook to a FLIP library dedicated to supporting low-income students, sharing was everywhere – but still somehow invisible. The years-long efforts of a determined staff member in the purchasing office to “rehome” furniture probably saved the College thousands of dollars and thousands of pounds of emissions. But this type of work was neither accounted for, nor resourced. To elevate and support this invisible ecosystem, in 2020 Barnard began piloting with Rheaply, a digital peer-to-peer internal reuse platform, and officially launched on campus in the fall of 2021.

The Sustainability Office, established in 2017, had been advocating for adopting the Rheaply platform for years with little success (see barriers section below). In the spring of 2019, a student conducted a survey that indicated that access to affordable supplies was a significant barrier to entry for many students considering majors in the arts and architecture. At the same time, many arts departments on campus were concerned about the environmental impacts of materials commonly used in the studio classes. This coincidence of environmental and social concerns helped overcome the hesitance to adopt Rheaply, and, in 2020 the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Access Barnard, and Barnard Sustainability launched a pilot program. Rheaply provides a means for faculty, students, and staff to exchange supplies and materials, and allows the College to track metrics on these exchanges, making the invisible circular ecosystem more measurable. In addition, the reuse platform helps address some of the physical barriers of circularity by obviating the need for centralized storage; users simply hold on to an item until it is claimed. A report published by the EMF stated that for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), “using Rheaply for just 6 months resulted in nearly 500 items being shared across campus laboratories and departments, and saved $50,000 in avoided purchasing costs” (EMF, 2020). In the first month of Rheaply’s campus platform in the fall semester of 2021, the number of users has increased sixfold, from 100 initial users onboarded during the pilot period to over 600. In the first 8 weeks of the 2021 fall semester, Barnard’s Rheaply site hosted over 300 exchanges between community members; the total value of these exchanges was $15,631, and 1.1 tons of waste were diverted from landfills.

The value of these exchanges extends beyond dollars and pounds; sharing builds a harder-to-quantify but equally important element – community. Robust systems of sharing and mutual support have been shown to increase community connections, connections which are a key driver of resilience in the face of natural disasters and social upheaval. The argument becomes circular (pun intended): circularity practices are effective in fighting climate change, and are also effective in building the resilience communities will need in order to cope with climate change.

By leveraging all the knowledge, power and influence we have to push forward on these priorities we can build a circular economy. It will take deep collaboration between business, government and civil society, but the rewards will be well worth it; a stronger ecosystem that will be resilient for the decades to come, and a world where people and nature can live together in harmony. (Ishii & van Houten, 2020)

These benefits are relevant not only within the campus but in neighboring communities as well. Again, it’s a feedback loop; circular systems work better with a rich network of engaged users. Rich engagement supports community connections, builds resilience, and fosters yet more mutual support. Cognizant of these extended benefits, Barnard and Rheaply are actively working to extend the Barnard exchange ecosystem to include our neighbors, including Columbia University, local community organizations, and local arts organizations.

The benefits of circularity extend beyond trash, or even course supplies, to some of the largest “objects” on a campus. ​​In 2020–2021, Barnard launched a $150 million renovation of Altschul Hall, Barnard’s 126,000 square-foot science building. Constructed in 1969, the building as it currently stands is a significant energy hog and therefore presents strong potential for electrification: the building is currently served by a dual-fuel system of oil and natural gas that not only heats and cools the building itself but also serves other buildings on campus. Redesigning the Altschul plant will be a significant step towards decarbonizing campus energy systems and is a necessary step towards net zero emissions. However, in addition to the Scope 1 and 2 emissions reduction potential of the building redesign, a circular approach will also significantly reduce the impact of the renovation itself. First and foremost, the decision to renovate and add to the building, rather than tear it down and build from scratch is a strong starting point: according to the Institute for Market Transformation, retrofitting can save up to 75% of a construction project’s embodied carbon (Duncan, 2019). A project the scale of Altschul, built with all-new materials, could represent as much as 52,000 tons of carbon consumption (Heath, 2020).

Given the scale of the project and the potential savings across all three Scopes, Barnard developed a set of “Design, Construction, and Deconstruction Guiding Principles” to serve as a sustainability guideline for the project. Key principles include prioritizing reclaimed materials, designing for repair, longevity, maintenance, and upgrade, and providing documentation of circular and sustainable design and material choices. For example, metrics required of architects and project managers include tracking the percentage of used or reclaimed materials vs. new materials, percentage of certified sustainably and ethically produced new materials, and percentage of demolition materials recycled or rehomed.

Altschul Hall represents a large-scale example of the power of a circular approach in reducing emissions from a construction project. A much smaller case study, from Barnard’s Department of Theatre, illustrates how this decision-making framework, in addition to addressing emissions and material impacts, can also support greater equity. A 2017 study commissioned by the Barnard College Department of Theatre demonstrates that simply by increasing the amount of reclaimed materials used in design and construction, a given production can significantly reduce emissions:

One show built with roughly 50% used materials, with a $7,000 materials budget, was responsible for the equivalent of emissions from one American home for 6 months. Building the show entirely out of used materials would cut emissions by as much as 75%, and building ‘all new’ would have doubled emissions. (Gotham 360, 2017)

Following this study, the department designed and implemented policies to track and incentivize reuse, including a new budget structure, publicizing reuse statistics in programs, and introducing sustainability and circular goals during the hiring process for guest directors and designers. As the department began increasing the percentage of reused materials over time (from about 50% in 2016 to 68% in 2019), the intersections between environmental benefits and questions of human sustainability and equity became tangible: when Barnard Theatre began spending less on new materials, the department reallocated that money to more fairly compensate those undertaking the labor needed to source used items. Barnard was able to spend this newfound money on local artisans skilled in sourcing, refinishing, and refining used items. Since 2016 the department has raised design fees by 58% and prop artisan compensation by about 70%. The reallocation of funds formerly spent on new materials constituted 60% of the increase. Once the production team began ‘spending money on people, not stuff,’ advocating for increased fees and prioritizing the artists involved in circular practices, it became easier to reallocate departmental funding for artist compensation, a major equity issue in the American theatre (Goldmark & Purdum, 2021).

These three examples – reuse with Rheaply, the Altschul Hall renovation, and the reallocation of material budgets towards artist fees in theatre – represent circularity in different arenas and at different scales. Together, they illustrate how a circular framework can be a powerful tool for reducing waste and emissions, and for addressing issues of community, equity, and justice.

It is important to acknowledge that other higher education institutions across the globe are working on developing and implementing their own circular frameworks. For example, MIT has taken “a complex, multi-solution approach” to waste and circularity that includes analyzing “inflows,” “stock,” and “outputs” across campus, promoting reuse, creating better signs, introducing centralized sorting stations and food collection, and community engagement programs (EMF, 2020). The MIT case study underscores the need for a complex strategy that blends technological and social approaches, a theme that applies to circularity programs designed to address a range of issues. The University of Manchester created a Living Campus Plan which includes high-quality, greenspace with room to learn, think and connect with people; preventative and restorative health benefits; natural resilience to climate change; support for biodiversity; and space, habitats, and corridors for wildlife (The University of Manchester, n.d.). The University of Portsmouth is doing numerous things at a campus level to reduce waste and embed circular practices. Examples include composting of all food waste at the university; the reuse of glass milk bottles for any event catering; cooking oil (a vegetable oil) turned into biofuel by a charity organization (Yateley), which is then bought back by the university to power its catering vans; and the re-use of broken slates that had been removed as part of refurbishment from the university’s roof and turned into trays to be used for catering events (EMF, n.d.-b). Falmouth University includes activities such as sustainable printing, campus tree planting, and vegan and vegetarian catering. Falmouth’s wildflower areas on campus have increased by 60% (4.5 acres), supporting native flora and fauna regeneration. In addition, they provide discounts on food and drink when students bring their own reusable containers to campus outlets, plastic bottles are no longer offered in vending machines, and food prepared on-site is packaged in biodegradable and compostable packaging (EMF, n.d.-c). As part of Stellenbosch University’s ecological sustainability strategy, the South African institution aims to rehabilitate 90% of eroded areas by increasing local, endemic species by 20% and increasing the living microorganisms in the soil of garden areas (EMF, n.d.-d).

One common characteristic in many of these plans, including Barnard’s, is a multi-faceted approach to circularity solutions. Some strategies might be top-down, like replacing a boiler or instituting a purchasing policy. Some require technology, like Rheaply. Some solutions are more bottom-up, like cultivating a culture shift towards reuse. By leveraging the power of both toolsets in tandem – the technological and the social – we can plan for and ensure a circular, equitable campus future.

8 Challenges to Circularity

Barnard’s location in New York may make our campus an ideal testing ground for circular systems, but the city also complicates certain aspects of college life, perhaps best exemplified in the annual high-drama spectacle that is move-out. This springtime ritual represents an opportunity to actively support equity and circularity and also exemplifies many of the challenges typical to making the transition to new patterns of behavior and operations.

Barnard does not store any student belongings over the summer, so each May births a chaotic, frenzied swirl of students packing up clothes, books, bedding, cookware, mini-fridges, electronics, and all the other accoutrements of dorm life, piling them high into wheeled hampers and wobbling down the sidewalks while coordinating pickups with harried parents, who are themselves battling the unsavory realities of New York City traffic and parking rules. This massive displacement of students and their “stuff” results in an enormous amount of discarded goods common to American residential colleges. Campuses all over the country have developed versions of what Barnard and Columbia call “Give and Go Green.” In our case, until 2017, students would “drop off” (a better word might be dump) unneeded items in various lounges or other spaces in the residential buildings. Other students often combed through the piles, taking whatever they needed. Of the large quantities of goods that remained, the majority was donated to Goodwill or similar partner organizations. A very small fraction was stored – usually in a small departmental storage space managed by a friendly administrator – and sold in the fall at a Green Sale. Originally managed entirely by students, in 2017 the program was in danger of being canceled due to general mess, stress on the facilities team, and an incident of a student’s property getting erroneously absorbed into the “Give and Go” vortex and disappearing. Give and Go Green was an attempt to address a larger problem: an enormous overflow of goods, a grotesque amount of waste, and the pressure to compress the move-out process for 2700 students into a very short period of time. But the program was quickly on its way to being perceived as the problem.

A number of campus partners, led by the Sustainability team and Student Government representatives, began trying to find a way to salvage and hopefully improve the program. Our goals were to better manage the flow of goods so that the Facilities team was not overwhelmed with mounds of abandoned items, create a more orderly system for dropoff, and find a way to store a much larger number of items over the summer so that students did not have to buy as much new stuff in the fall. We had some successes, some failures, and many ongoing challenges. We moved the program out of the dorms, though it was always difficult to secure space since move-out happens right around commencement when large spaces are often used for events. We secured offsite storage for the summer so that we could sell more used goods on campus, as opposed to donating to already overwhelmed second-hand partner organizations. In doing so, we increased the revenues from the Green Sale from $600 to $6000. We reserved hours for Barnard staff members to select items to take home; most of the staff who came to “shop” work in Facilities and Dining Service, two of the lowest paid departments on campus. By increasing student staffing, limiting donation hours, and communicating more clearly with the student body, we began to find ways to operate the program that worked better, for students, facilities, residential life, and events management.⁵

Despite these successes, the program remained challenging on many fronts. First and foremost, it’s important to remember that Give and Go Green is, at best, a necessarily limited response to a much bigger problem: a system related to on-campus factors like the tight move-out schedule as well as global realities like the low price of new goods, all of which encourage fast consumption and disposal of material goods. Nonetheless, the challenges that besieged our Give and Go Green program are emblematic of the barriers endemic to making sustainability changes, and especially building circular systems. These include (but are certainly not limited to):

• Space: Our urban campus is limited in the amount of space available to host large events, store items for the summer, or set up a workshop to repair items for reuse.

• Funding: Give and Go Green, when managed by the students, was run entirely by volunteers, who were given meals and a housing extension. The Office of Sustainability is committed to paying student workers a fair wage, so when the program became administered by staff, we worked to provide monetary compensation as well. This meant using our limited budget, securing grants, and increasing the revenues from the sale – while keeping prices low enough to be accessible to students.

• Bandwidth: For all involved, Give and Go Green comes at a challenging time of year. Students are finishing finals and rushing to pack up, staff are preparing for commencement, the Facilities team is clearing out the dorms, and everyone is stretched thin.

• Inertia: This type of program requires collaboration with several other departments who are often very supportive of the idea but understandably hesitant to commit to learning and implementing new systems when they are already stretched to capacity. Habitual patterns are easy to repeat, especially when under pressure.

• Low prioritization: The Give and Go Green program coincides with the high-profile commencement ceremonies, and the fall Green Sale is just one event in a week jam-packed with new student orientation activities. These busy times of year leave little extra capacity for initiatives that are not necessarily perceived as high priorities.

• Cost (or perception of cost): As a relatively resource-strapped college, the potential cost of expanding or building new programs is of course a factor. However, the savings from reuse are rarely factored into decision-making, sometimes leaving cost discussions imbalanced.

• Buy-in: The benefits of a circular economy model are not always immediately obvious to all campus partners. To some, these events are messy and more work than they are worth.

• Inclusion: Many students need similar items, but not all of them have the same opportunities to obtain them. What started as an environmentally-friendly initiative expanded into an attempt to provide necessary items to as many students as possible. This can sometimes create tensions, for example between the need to pay student workers fairly and the need to keep prices low for students.

• Distributed Accountability: Reducing emissions and changing ingrained patterns cuts across operational and disciplinary divisions; assigning accountability for College-wide goals to the appropriate departments can be challenging, especially when accountability is shared.

These challenges are not unique to Give and Go Green, or to Barnard. The University of Manchester identifies similar barriers, and translates them to the organizational scale:

Lack of awareness and understanding of the CE (Circular Economy) concept, principles, benefits and applicability to the university context; suitable analytical frameworks, data gathering systems and KPI’s [key performance indicators] to identify, evaluate, prioritise, implement, monitor and manage CE solutions; and leadership teams, allocation of responsibilities, stakeholder engagement and effective policies targeting CE as an instrumental strategy for a long-term sustainability. (Mendoza et al., 2019, p. 838)

These barriers to circularity are similar to many typical barriers to sustainability management – often with the added dimension that partners may not perceive the connections between circularity, climate action, and environmental justice.

However, when you begin to think not only about reducing waste and making move-out less of a colossal headache but begin to consciously consider inclusion and justice as well, some of the ways we think about these common challenges can shift. For example, one core principle of environmental justice is that environmental burdens and benefits should be fairly distributed. With a student body with a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, the incredible waste of move-out starts to look even more grotesque. Some students are able to abandon room furnishings, duvet sets, and winter coats, while other students struggle to pay for dorm supplies.

In the context of these economic differences in our community, move-out and green sale programs become an opportunity to redistribute high-quality supplies. For several years, Barnard has partnered with Grad Bag, a local non-profit, to collect bedding, rugs, and other supplies. Barnard has hosted Let’s Get Ready’s annual Transition Day program, where Grad Bag distributed cleaned and nicely packaged bedding to more than 250 first-generation and low-income (FLI) college students from around New York City. Similarly, we reserve a portion of dorm supplies for Barnard’s FLI students. Our goal, of course, would be that eventually, all students would use repurposed dorm supplies every fall and that none of the annual mounds of puffy vests, colanders, rugs, fans, lamps, mini-fridges would go to landfill. No longer would the college pay for buses to go down to Bed Bath and Beyond on shopping trips; those resources would be deployed to better manage the flow and redistribution of gently used supplies. Students with the highest need are given first access to supplies, and reuse becomes the default for all.

This process demands the participation of many stakeholders, most importantly the FLI students who might benefit most from a Green Sale. A core principle of environmental justice is the importance of including affected communities in building programming. Accordingly, we have worked hard at Barnard to create initiatives in response to student needs and desires, rather than making assumptions. For example, a 2020 student summer cohort at the Digital Humanities Center (DHC) conducted a study “Examining Sustainability at Barnard” that explored concepts of circularity. The project makes clear recommendations, like a laptop lending library and revising the 4-year “expiration” timeline that leads to new computer purchases for faculty and staff. The DHC students underlined the links between circular practices and inclusion, pointing out that “many aspects of the core principles of circular economy and other popular sustainability initiatives have a lot in common with Indigenous sustainability practices,” (Burton et al., n.d.) and that naming and acknowledging these similarities must be central to Barnard’s approach.

Another instance where students were able to shape programming occurred as the result of a 2020 course called “Change and Climate Change.” A student created a project exploring sustainability and access, examining ways that Barnard might ensure that sustainability initiatives are inclusive and shaped by the communities they impact. Regarding reuse, for example, the class discussed how some of them came from communities where reuse was seen as something to move away from as a family income increased, rather than something to embrace. The students themselves were largely supportive of reuse but were careful to note that programming needed to take into account a range of attitudes and backgrounds. The project, and the class discussions that ensued, led directly to a Campus Conversation on Sustainability and Access the following year, where students, faculty, and staff made recommendations on policy and programming. This process of engaging the community in defining priorities and policies is one key strategy for overcoming some of the all-too-familiar roadblocks on the way to a circular, sustainable campus.

9 Pathways to Circularity: Starting Small, Thinking Big

In 2018, faced with piles of trash on a tarp, a campus-wide holistic response felt very distant. And it’s still true – we have a long way to go. But we have made progress, and, despite the many challenges, that progress is thanks to a few key strategies that can be implemented on any campus:

• 1. Build on what already exists

• 2. Find your allies

• 3. Link to other goals

• 4. Address inertia and psychological safety

• 5. Measure progress

At Barnard, we began building a circular campus by expanding or adapting systems that already existed. Our students, faculty, and staff, without using the term circular economy, had been championing the practices for years. “Barnard Buy Sell Trade” is a student Facebook group where students can exchange or sell everything from clothing to textbooks to kitchen supplies. Students led the Give and Go Green process. Faculty members placed used textbooks outside their office with paper signs saying “free books.” Business Services staff tried to find new homes for office furniture, on-campus and off. Public safety regularly donated their “lost and found” items to local charities. The Art, Architecture, and Theatre departments, along with Barnard’s Design Center, maintained (usually informal) inventories of free shared supplies and tools. Of course, the libraries hummed along as they always had, the original circular campus. And when the Sustainability Office was formed, the faculty and staff leadership team happened to have a passion for reuse, thrift, and repair. These formal and informal activities across campus, from sharing art supplies to working with waste haulers to signing food contracts, are found on many campuses, and when united, measured, and scaled under one ambitious umbrella, can have a significant impact.

Moving beyond the informal, adaptive networks of Facebook groups and cardboard boxes in the hall towards a campus-wide system and culture, however, requires conscious strategizing, including finding early allies, and linking initiatives to other core value programming. Most of the informal systems described above are maintained or supported by individual stakeholders on campus, either out of personal conviction or because the systems serve a real but otherwise unanswered need. For example, as noted above Barnard’s Purchasing department undertakes a significant amount of “furniture rehoming,” due to a desire to save money and reduce waste. These efforts are significant but largely voluntary and often under-resourced. Finding these champions, celebrating their work, and inviting them to join the process of naming and resourcing these informal systems is a necessary first step. For other campus partners, it may be more effective and is just as necessary to link the work of circularity to other core value initiatives. For example, at Barnard, adopting the Rheaply pilot was seen as a way to reduce waste and also to support FLI students.

Despite the many supporters of sustainable and circular new policies, and despite the perceived benefits for students, moving change through any organization is a significant challenge. The University of Manchester recommends creating “mixed teams of senior managers and operational staff” (Mendoza et al., 2019, p. 841) to ensure successful implementation. At Barnard, we have found that including faculty and students as well as staff of all levels is indeed critical, as is linking the work of circularity to other campus-wide goals and initiatives.

We have identified a number of practices designed to situate our approach to circularity within a larger net zero pathway and overarching social justice goals, and to involve many members of the community. First, the Office of Sustainability regularly convenes stakeholders to discuss challenges and identify goals. The Office was launched in 2017–2018 with a year-long Campus Conversation series, open to students, faculty, and staff. Students are active participants (and often a driving force) on the Sustainable Practices Committee. Partnerships with the Center for Engaged Pedagogy in 2020 and 2021 provided a forum for faculty from a range of disciplines to discuss climate in the curriculum. And in 2020, the Office of Sustainability hosted a Citizens’ Assembly and Campus Conversation series. These regular convenings, plus many other related events, help to keep our community engaged and invested.

The at times creative chaos of this engagement strategy is balanced by a conscious process of specific goal setting, supported by outside consultants, and linked to global science-based targets. The 2017–2018 Campus Conversation series fed directly into the College’s first comprehensive published Climate Action Vision in 2019, encompassing goals in Academics, Finance & Governance, and Campus Culture & Operations. Three key goals in the 2019 Vision highlight areas where circularity intersects with overall climate strategy:

• 1. Barnard achieves emissions reductions across all three scopes, in line with or exceeding the ambitious New York state and city standards.

• 2. Barnard’s environmentally sound and socially ethical system of consumption on campus serves as a model for circular economy solutions.

• 3. Campus initiatives on sustainability, diversity and inclusion, wellness, and other mission-driven values are integrated and mutually supportive.

Circularity provides a tool kit for working at the micro and macro scale, toggling between the mounds of duvets and abandoned mini-fridges at Give and Go Green, and the big picture visions and goals. A key part of keeping the small and large-scale components moving in the right direction is figuring out how to measure progress.

10 How to Measure

As we have seen, many of the behaviors and associated emissions that fall under the main components of our circular campus framework fall under “Scope 3.” This category of emissions is notoriously hard to measure, and is often, as a result, under-addressed. Conscious of this common gap in emissions accounting, in 2015 Barnard commissioned a small study from Gotham 360 to create a comprehensive carbon footprint. This may sound like an oxymoron – a small study for a comprehensive footprint? The College had been participating in the NYC Mayor’s Carbon Challenge for several years, which required only very limited reporting on Scope 3 emissions, largely in terms of waste tonnage. No other Scope 3 emissions were being measured. In 2015, the Sustainable Practices Committee secured a small amount of funding for a study that would look more carefully at the whole emissions picture. We worked with consultants from Gotham 360 (including several Barnard alumnae) to create what we called a “hazy, but complete” snapshot of our emissions, as opposed to the more granular but incomplete data we were familiar with from the Mayor’s Carbon Challenge. We felt it was more important to get an overview analysis of all our major sources of emissions than to worry about total precision. We didn’t need to know the exact numbers to start making changes where the impact would be the greatest, and we were not satisfied with the more typical practice of only reviewing very limited and selective Scope 3 data. The results of the Gotham study, shown in Fig. 20.2, indicated that, indeed, Scope 3 emissions were a significant portion of our total emissions – as much as two-thirds.

Fig. 20.2

Barnard Emission Sources, 2015

This initial measurement provided a clear rationale for pursuing a strong Scope 3 emissions reduction strategy. Now, 6 years later, we are able to launch a more in-depth study as part of our larger pathway to net zero, which includes analysis of and strategies pertaining to all three Scopes (see Fig. 20.1). This roadmap to net zero, under development with the help of consultants from Energy Strategies, will assess our current Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and outline strategies and potential costs for reduction, from electrification to renewable energy procurement. In addition, this roadmap includes a 3-step approach to Scope 3 emissions:

• 1. Create a detailed inventory of Barnard’s Scope 3 emissions, using global greenhouse gas protocols.

• 2. Determine focus categories for reductions in line with science-based global targets, including a weighted system for choosing areas of focus based on a number of factors, such as perceived importance to the College community or our ability to impact results.

• 3. Translate these goals into an operational language that meshes with Barnard’s operational systems, e.g., by framing goals in terms of our existing chart of accounts, budgeting protocols, and business management systems.

The initial assessment tool will then be able to be used for internal tracking year over year. The College is also in the process of transitioning to a new enterprise management system called Workday, and we are working with that team to make collecting data on Scope 3 related expenditures much easier. For example, our current system includes airfare, hotel stays, and food under one label of “domestic or international travel.” By coordinating with the Workday transition team, we will in the future be able to separate these elements, making data collection simpler and emissions calculations more accurate.

As a holistic framework, of course, a circular campus requires tracking more than greenhouse gas emissions. Measuring progress on a circular campus involves monitoring waste, diversion, purchases, reuse, food, and emissions associated with all of these activities. And, as a college campus, measuring success also requires tracking related courses and research. Since that first Gotham 360 carbon footprint, and including those waste audits on tarps in classrooms, gathering data has been a challenge, though we have made significant progress.

Outside of the NYC Mayor’s Challenge reporting, the first circular campus data we ever collected was through those classroom waste audits. Students went out back to the dumpsters and started weighing bags while others sorted through samples. Our waste hauler did not provide us with monthly tonnage, so these student audits were the best source of data for our diversion rates. It wasn’t much, but we had enough to convince our facilities team to let us create new signs, reposition waste collection stations, and implement limited organics collection. Even then, it wasn’t until a new building was built with room for compactors to be installed that we could begin getting consistent and accurate data on waste. Other informal methods of collecting initial data included student surveys, and conversations with campus partners, like the Purchasing office, or individual departments with circular practices in place, like Architecture. Our student work-study team also spends a great deal of time collecting data manually when it is available, but not easily accessible. This includes combing through course catalogs using keywords to determine courses related to climate or sustainability, searching faculty profiles to determine areas of research, and creating inventories of waste stations on campus. It is not efficient, but it is a way to start the process, demonstrate need, and generate the buy-in necessary for building more robust and centralized tracking mechanisms.

Compiling the first round of data eventually brought us to the point where we felt we could participate in the Advancing Sustainability in Higher Education’s (AASHE) Sustainability, Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS). STARS is a holistic self-study that when completed, acts as a full baseline for all of the sustainability metrics the College reported. Before we started, we got permission from the President’s office for this year-long undertaking that required sending surveys to the community and working with 25+ offices and individuals across campus. Working with so many offices gave us the opportunity to start discussions about sustainability with many of our colleagues and build a replicable process for ongoing tracking of metrics related to circularity.

Barnard’s internal efforts to measure circularity are tailored to our organization and will evolve over time. For our campus, and for others, there is a range of external tools and frameworks to reference. For example, Circulytics, a measurement tool launched by the EMF, was created to support companies in the transition “towards the circular economy, regardless of industry, complexity, and size” (EMF, n.d.-e). This free, award-winning tool can identify what aspects of a company’s operation enable circularity and what outcomes the company can accomplish by transitioning to a circular economy. Another tool to measure circularity is the Circular Transition Indicators (CTI) framework created by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). This quantitative framework provides companies with a common language for internal decision-making and communication to key stakeholders (WBCSD, n.d.). Besides looking at processes or materials in which circularity is already present, this tool helps understand the company’s material consumption and its relationship with successful business more widely; however, it does not measure wider environmental or social impacts (Lehtinen et al., 2020). Such tools support companies and institutions in making the decision to adopt the circular economy in their activities, measure progress, and increase the transparency of circular activities. Largely useful as references at this point, these tools might in the future be adapted to serve institutions of higher education.

11 Teaching and Research

Circularity is rooted in community engagement and radical collaboration, and therefore research, diversity of thought, and both theoretical and empirical experience are needed to become circular. To create innovative circular systems and make sustainable decisions we need research in the sciences, advances in design and technology, and a deep understanding of the historical, social, and political implications of any changes. We also need diversity of intellectual disciplines in order to develop new approaches, revive powerful practices from the past, or identify and resource existing but often unseen successful strategies. These requirements place teaching and research at the heart of any movement towards an inclusive and just circularity.

Barnard does not yet have a clearly identified body of courses and research aimed specifically at circularity. We have, however, identified 198 courses as “sustainability-related” or “sustainability-focused.” These courses are taught across 64.4% of departments, including Architecture, Economics, Environmental Science, Theatre, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies. 45 faculty in 29 departments engage in sustainability or climate-related research. A number of these courses (and some research) include modules related to circularity, though we do not have an accurate count at this time.

In addition, teaching and research do not only happen in a physical classroom or a lab. Barnard students have been involved in every step of the climate action and circular campus planning, from serving on committees to participating in our 2019 Citizen Assembly to attending events like “Women, Clothing, and Climate,” a 2018 used clothing sale, repair workshop, and panel discussion. In addition, Barnard’s Climate Action Grant program allows students and staff to apply for funding for campus projects, and a significant portion of the initial cohort of grantees proposed initiatives related to circularity. Classroom projects, like our waste audits, and student-led initiatives help fuel lasting operational changes. For example, students at Barnard’s Athena Center developed an internal carbon tax prototype that helped engage our Finance department in thinking through strategies to more accurately measure carbon-heavy activities like travel and purchasing, and eventually helped lead to the Workday partnership on gathering sustainability metrics. Most importantly, in the classroom and in the “campus as lab,” the circular campus framework aims to provide students with skills and knowledge to empower them to address society’s future challenges and make a positive impact in the world.

Many global peer institutions are expanding circularity in their curricula, performing research related to the subject, and creating outstanding initiatives to help us shift from a linear model to a circular one. The Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre for Circular Metal at Brunel University will explore how the reuse of metals can benefit the environment and the UK economy and will develop an understanding of how the country can best shift towards a carbon-neutral, circular economy by 2050. Over the next decade, this could generate more than £100 billion for the UK economy (The Interdisciplinary Centre for Circular Metals, n.d.). The Laurea University of Applied Sciences has a project called Purater, which provides information about the usability and safety of demolition materials reuse and analysis of suitable policy instruments (EMF, n.d.-f). Another example is the Campus Nature demo (2019–2020), a joint project of B2N Research Group, the University Properties of Finland Ltd., and Tampere University in which novel green areas around the city center campus were created together with students to enhance biodiversity and recreational opportunities (EMF, n.d.-g). Scientists at the University of Portsmouth have successfully developed a naturally occurring enzyme that can digest some of the most commonly polluting plastics (EMF, n.d.-b). Falmouth University is implementing a number of initiatives at the campus level, such as promoting free public transport and Edible Pathways’ initiative in development, which will, in addition to planting new edible fruit trees and plants around campus, provide signage for areas of biodiversity and edible food plants (EMF, n.d.-c). African Leadership University’s students have started circular economy ventures, such as Wastezon, an e-waste recycling company (EMF, n.d.-h). The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) has created a Natural Dye Garden as part of a student project. The plants – including sunflowers, coreopsis, and marigolds – can provide nontoxic fabric dyes used in campus textile research. Incorporating composting, the Dye Garden promotes more circular and eco-friendly dyeing practices and related research (EMF, n.d.-i). New York University (NYU) has an Urban Food lab, an aquaponic vertical farming class in which students learn about sustainability and farming by running their own projects connecting their fields to the farm (EMF, n.d.-j). These examples, and many more, demonstrate the power of an approach that utilizes the classroom and the lab to develop and test pathways to a just and sustainable circular campus.

12 Conclusion: Connecting the Dots Between Circularity, Net Zero, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Circularity is a key strategy in any global approach to climate change and environmental degradation. Similarly, Barnard’s circular campus approach is a core component of our overall approach to sustainability and climate action, including our pathway to net zero emissions and our commitment to environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). As we have seen, Scope 3 emissions have historically been significantly undercounted on our campus, as has been the case for many other schools and organizations. The circular campus framework creates specific pathways for tackling those emissions, and the behaviors that fuel them; circular systems provide opportunities to link the College’s emissions reductions work with the everyday life of our community. While addressing Scope 1 and 2 emissions is critical to our net zero roadmap, many of the necessary changes to address them can be made without significant participation from the majority of our students, faculty, and staff. But addressing patterns around purchasing, food, waste, green spaces, and course supplies by definition demands participation from everyone on campus. And, in building behavioral and cultural changes, the College has an opportunity and a responsibility to directly link our emissions reduction work with our commitment to social and environmental justice. Circularity can be a framework to reduce our environmental impact; it is an equally powerful tool for distributing resources more widely, both within our campus and with our neighbors. This simple act of sharing resources – and building the administrative and operational systems to do so purposefully and at scale – is a tangible and measurable way to support a more equitable and less environmentally destructive pattern of living.