Marquette University
PAE-4: Sustainability Plan

The Office of Sustainability developed a Sustainability Strategic Planning Document to act as an informal sustainability plan for the time being. After initially drafting the strategic planning document and its areas of focus and goals, the document was shared with the Sustainability Task Force and its four sustainability working groups for evaluation and critique. Changes were made based on group feedback and the document is now in its latest version. The document is revisited each summer for updating and measuring progress.

One goal within the Sustainability Strategic Planning Document is to further reduce Marquette’s resource consumption and ecological footprint. The Recycling Working Group recently released the goal of achieving a 50 percent recycling rate by 2015. The group will track the campus waste streams and recycling efforts on a monthly basis and determine areas for reducing waste and/or increasing recycling and composting. Future versions of the document will look at short-, medium-, and long-term reduction goals for campus energy and water use as well.

Most of the current goals within the Sustainability Strategic Planning Document are measured simply by whether or not they have been achieved. Such goals include: developing a Mission and Vision statement for the university’s sustainability program; develop a funding mechanism for financing sustainability initiatives; using STARS to benchmark Marquette’s sustainability efforts; and to continue gathering and communicating those efforts to the campus community. Once these initial goals have been achieved, the Office of Sustainability will switch its focus to short-, medium, and long-term initiatives.