When it comes to hitting carbon neutrality on campus, Sustainability Director Ian Johnson says electrical, power, and natural gas emissions are of concern, but are not the biggest challenge.

The biggest challenge relates to emissions due to waste, emissions due to business travel (by air), and faculty, staff, and student commuting. All of these pieces are captured in the campus’ carbon footprint, but they’re not necessarily directly controlled by CC. For that reason, offsets become important — but not necessarily in the way one would expect.

“My preference, by far, is to find ways in the community to generate offsets rather than just go out and buy offsets on the market somewhere. The market — that becomes a financial liability that we pay into every year. There’s no real learning or literacy development that comes out of that,” Johnson said. “And it has no impact here, at all, really. Usually it’s rainforests down in Brazil somewhere or wind farms in Alberta, which are great, but don’t do much for us here.”

It’s for that reason, and with a broader emphasis on working with the local community that CC has begun to connect with nonprofits in the area that are “on the cusp of doing something, where our involvement might make that happen.”

In exchange for student labor and expertise, CC would receive the rights to any carbon offsets that can be quantified from that particular project.

Currently piloting the concept is Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado. The nonprofit has been working toward a zero-waste program. While they had some pieces in place, they needed someone to come in and push it to the next level, perhaps turning the nonprofit’s waste into a commodity market that would produce a revenue stream to help fund their programs.

Johnson placed a Sustainability Office intern at Care and Share to help them figure out how to make the project viable and how to create a model that could be rolled out to their affiliates.
In return, all of the organization’s waste that’s no longer going to the landfill becomes a potential carbon offset for CC, if it can be quantified and verified.

“Right now it’s relatively small. We’re talking on the order of 1,000 to 2,000 metric tons a year, which is up to 5 percent of our total carbon footprint, but that has potential to grow as that program grows.”

“It’s also just a pilot model for all the different ways that we can get involved, not necessarily just with waste diversion, but ways we can partner with other community organizations to help create the win-win situation. … using creation of nontraditional markets — things like greenhouse gas offsets, carbon offsets, and other commodity markets — as catalysts for change.