USC’s emissions two-thirds of 2014 baseline, latest sustainability update reports

In line with its goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2025, USC’s greenhouse gas emissions recorded a 31% decrease last year compared to a base year of 2014, according to the university’s 2022 Sustainability Report.

The report, released Friday, details the university’s sustainability achievements and ongoing challenges as part of the Carol Folt administration’s mission: Earth, a framework for “a greener campus and planet.”

Despite a trend to reduce emissions, last year’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions — owned or controlled by the university — have increased by about 30,000 since 2021, as building closures during the pandemic and remote operations combined reduced energy consumption.

Most of USC’s emissions in 2022 came from purchased electricity, most of which was sourced from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Energy. More than 60% of LA’s energy was carbon-free as of February 2022, thanks to investments in wind, solar, and battery storage.

Though the university secured a solar energy deal with LADWP last October, Chief Sustainability Officer Mick Dalrymple said he doesn’t expect any more separate energy deals as long as LADWP continues to decarbonize its power procurement. USC likely won’t exceed UCLA’s goal of 100% clean electricity by 2025, he said, made possible by UC’s own utility and solar array.

USC’s sustainability initiatives have also doubled waste, targeting zero waste by 2028. Last year there was a campus-wide waste diversion rate of 47%, which Dalrymple says is “not a bad number” given the 2028 goal. The university installed 72 new multi-stream bins in the university park and health sciences campus to separate waste.

HSC had the lowest waste diversion rate among USC facilities and campuses at 22%, in part due to the large amount of medical waste from single-use items. New initiatives are underway, Dalrymple said, to increase waste diversion at HSC.

“One of the initiatives they’re taking is replacing the single-use gowns, which they said are a tremendous amount of trash every day, and they’re replacing them with reusable gowns, which are now going to a laundry,” he said . “They have about four or five initiatives they’re taking to dramatically increase that number.”

The diversion rate at the Coliseum reached 86% for the 2021 football season with 64.25 tonnes of waste avoided going to landfill, rising to 92% for the 2022 football season.

Dalrymple said the university has had a lot of sustainability success since being hired in July 2021 as USC’s first-ever CSO because it targeted the “lowest-hanging fruit” — that is, the simplest initiatives with the highest paybacks.

“It’s going to be a lot harder from now on,” he said. “You tend to put off the hardest things for last because there isn’t a solution to it yet.”

A switch to LED lighting has been a top priority — with 20 buildings upgraded in 2022 — because it delivers a high return on energy efficiency, but replacing windows for the same purpose will be more difficult, Dalrymple said. There are many historic buildings on campus that have older windows that are more difficult and costly to replace, and the return on such modernizations tends to be lower.

USC’s biggest energy challenge, Dalrymple said, is decarbonizing infrastructure, including cooling and heating loops. While cooling is now primarily electric and becoming lower carbon as electricity comes from renewable sources, heating is via gas boilers.

“[Shifting to electric heating is] very hard and expensive because it means ripping out steam pipes and replacing them with hot water pipes and ripping out the gas boilers that are maybe 20 or 30 years old and replacing them with electric ones that might not work quite as well as well,” he said.

Another challenge is the balancing act between the expansion and further development of the campus – for example through the construction of new teaching complexes – while at the same time increasing sustainability.

“It’s almost like you have a moving target, but you know it’s moving and that’s part of the… deal,” Dalrymple said. “What you have to do is make sure that any growth you add adds as little extra stress as possible.”

Drinking water consumption per square foot of building area fell 15% last year from 2014 levels, falling short of the 25% reduction target set in the 2020 Sustainability Plan. Because USC’s water metric is per square foot and not cumulative, it accounts for growth.

The university installed high-efficiency faucets during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and is developing a native planting master plan to transition some landscaping to low-water-use plants. New native or climate-adapted landscaping resulted in estimated savings in average water use of 40% by 2022, but USC has no plans to completely eliminate its grassy lawns.

“I like to say that USC’s turfs are probably the hardest-working turfs. There are always events happening on many, many lawns,” Dalrymple said. “We’re not going to get rid of all the weed. It serves us as a really inexpensive facility. It’s a lot cheaper than building more buildings with meeting rooms.”

Three or four LEED Platinum buildings will be designed and built to be fully electric, Dalrymple said, and the renovated School of Dramatic Arts building — housed in the former United University Church — will also be a LEED Platinum project be.

Existing USC buildings will undergo post-commissioning inspections and fine-tuning of building operations and energy use as required by the City of LA to ensure minimal energy wastage. Dalrymple said this process is “really, really valuable and tends to yield a nice return.”

According to data from the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s annual survey, nearly 50% of student staff, staff, faculty and postdocs drove alone to campus last year, averaging 2.32 drivers per vehicle — above the SCAQMD goal of 1 ,5. More than 35% of respondents said they still work remotely.

The proportion of community members surveyed who walk, bike, or take the bus has more than doubled since 2014. The report does not include data on e-scooter use, which has increased in recent years, nor does it measure emissions caused by university-associated air travel.

“[Air travel] hasn’t been tracked separately before,” Dalymple said. “What I can say is that it’s less than 1% of our emissions … for the entire university, so by and large it’s very, very small.”

Dalrymple said he expects the 2023 sustainability report to reflect payouts from the LADWP solar contract signed last year, which will reduce emissions by about 20%.

“It’s not going to be for the whole year, but it’s going to be for most of the year, so next year we should see a pretty big drop in emissions, which will be very exciting,” Dalrymple said.