Updating Our Sustainability Goals

Our commitment to sustainability requires leadership, creativity, and the ability to be nimble as challenges and opportunities evolve. Our vision for sustainability at UK includes valuing environmental stewardship and social justice alongside economic considerations in all of our operations; and making these operations available to our students and faculty to enrich the learning, teaching, and research happening on our campus. This will be an important year for sustainability at UK because we will be updating our goals. We are seeking input and feedback from the campus to help guide this important process.

In January, the President’s Sustainability Advisory Committee kicked off efforts to update UK’s Sustainability Strategic Plan with a focus on what we can achieve by 2030. This update will build on the progress we made toward the goals established in UK’s first Sustainability Strategic Plan (2018-2022). As we prepare to reset our goals, it is important to celebrate the milestones and accomplishments we have achieved across our operations in recent years.

• Campus partners launched a large-scale food waste composting program.
• UK Transportation spearheaded programming and infrastructure to improve bicycling, earning Gold Level status as a Bicycle Friendly University from the League of American Bicyclists.
• Thanks to UK Recycling and partners, the campus waste diversion increased to 42% in 2020. This is excellent progress toward our goal of a 50% diversion rate.
• We have designed and built 25 new buildings that have earned LEED certification from the US Green Building Council.
• UK has been recognized by the Arbor Day Foundation as a Tree Campus USA for 10 years in a row.
• Our local food procurement reached new records with more than $2 million a year spent on local food and Kentucky-based food businesses.
• We are on track to meet or exceed our commitment to reduce campus greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2025.
• And late last year, we announced an agreement with Kentucky Utilities to purchase approximately one third of our power from a new solar development planned for construction in western KY by 2025.

Our update of the University’s sustainability targets will be aligned to support the University’s newly adopted Strategic Plan and its five core principles.

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