Amid budget cuts, funding freezes and President Carol Folt’s imminent retirement, USC Chief Officer of Sustainability Mick Dalrymple said the university remains committed to achieving its environmental goals this Earth Month.
Dalrymple reflected on the work completed by the Office of Sustainability through Assignment: Earth in their Fiscal Year 2024 Annual Report, and the future of sustainability at USC considering these changes at the university and federal levels.
“[Sustainability is] really critical to our future and to our students’ future, so I don’t see it being diminished,” Dalrymple said. “It’s just a matter of how much more important can we make it. I feel pretty confident going forward.”
Last week USC announced several financial cutbacks, including a capital spending slowdown. The university wrote in an email that “all capital projects will be reassessed to determine which may be deferred or paused.” Due to this, the Office of Sustainability’s projects exploring converting campus utility systems from steam to hot water and from gas to electric have been paused.
“Whenever we go and renovate anything or build anything new, the sustainability aspects are built into that through those guidelines,” Dalrymple said. “But then, when it comes to heavy capital projects related specifically to decarbonization, they’re going to have to slow down or be put on hold for a while.”
Dalrymple said Folt’s retirement would not hinder the office’s primary goals and projects. During her six-year tenure as university president, sustainability was one of Folt’s main focuses.
“Before President Folt came along, there was actually a committee in the Academic Senate for many years that started working on sustainability. But when she came is when it really kicked it into high gear, because then you had grassroots support and you had top-down leadership,” Dalrymple said. “She really helped catalyze and get this thing to a critical mass point, where it will continue even after she’s left, even with whatever the federal administration tries to do to reverse it.”
President Folt helped steward the USC Sustainability Moonshot Goals, part of her ambitious USC agenda. Assignment: Earth, an initiative created to accomplish the goals, aims to implement sustainable solutions across campus through 2028. The group released its Annual Report for the 2024 fiscal year on April 1.
One of the goals Folt introduced was achieving climate neutrality for scopes 1 and 2 emissions, set forth by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. For fiscal year 2025, Dalrymple said the university will limit the direct use, purchase and production of greenhouse gases. He said USC has already reached a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and in June the university will buy carbon offsets for any remaining emissions.
USC also reduced water usage per square foot of building space by 25% by 2025, surpassing the Assignment Earth goal of a 20% reduction by 2028. Dalrymple explained this was primarily due to landscaping changes and a new water usage dashboard.
“We actually used a student intern to help develop a dashboard that put all of that data onto a monitoring system,” Dalrymple said. “It tracks past usage patterns, and it’ll set off a little alert if there’s a possible leak, so we can go investigate it so we can head off problems earlier.”
According to Dalrymple, over 5 million single-use plastic bottles have been prevented since the introduction of the single-use plastic elimination policy in July 2022. He also said USC’s waste diversion rate is 54%, aided by the introduction of multistream waste bins outside tailgates.
The office is planning several events to increase sustainability awareness on campus this Earth Month, which begins Tuesday. On April 1, the Sustainability Hub will host Tommy’s Closet, a distribution of lightly used clothing donations to students. On April 8, the Arts & Climate Collective Festival will show student art and projects about environmental justice at Founders Park. On April 16, the Student Sustainability Committee of the Presidential Working Group on Sustainability and the Environmental Student Assembly are hosting a student sustainability town hall with Folt in Doheny Memorial Library.
The USC Sustainability Survey also launched last week, which collects data on campus habits each year. The survey was sent to the USC community on March 24 and is open until April 15.
“The more students and employees that take it, the more the better. The better our research analysis of how we’re doing,” Dalrymple said. “It ends up being more accountability on us as the administration to basically hold our feet to the fire, to actually be getting this stuff done and out the door. So of course, everybody’s part of this.”