Welcome to Brazos Matters.

I'm Jay Socol.

From time to time, we have talked about the immense progress that Texas A&M has made since the mid 2000s in the area of sustainability.

And so that's things that we all think about, like recycling or water saving fountains or faucets.

But even construction and demolition practices, the academic courses that are offered the renewable energy sources in A&M's power portfolio and the way our 80,000 students just move around campus.

The latest progress report is out from A&M Office of Sustainability and Community Enrichment, and we want to dig into that a little bit.

And here to help us do that is sustainability manager Danielle Laperriere.

Danielle, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me, Jay.

I'm really looking forward to this.

So let's start with you.

What is your background and how did you end up at Texas A&M?

Yeah, I am a recent citizen of the United States.

I celebrate my one year anniversary of citizenship next month.

Great.

Very excited about that.

But I'm originally from Canada.

My background is in community sustainability, where I work with municipal politics to set community climate action plans or community sustainability plans.

And when I moved to Texas, I learned a lot about Texas, and I'm really quickly it's a flagship institution in the state, and I felt like this would be a good place for me to apply those skills because, after all, the university is just a little city, actually a quite big one.

Yeah.

So did you find us or do we find you?

I found you.

It just happened to be a bit of serendipity.

I had finished up some work in the nonprofit sector and was looking for what my next role was, and the longtime sustainability manager, Ben had just stepped down and Kelly was looking to grow her team.

So it was a natural fit and I think we both got lucky.

So when you're talking to friends or family back in Canada and they're asking you, Hey, what is Texas A&M like?

What is your part of Texas like?

What are some of the things you tell them?

Yeah, I blow them away with our student body count.

As soon as I mentioned, 70,000 or over 70,000, they're blown away.

There's only one institution in the entire country that is that big, and it's at several campuses, not a single campus like this.

And then they ask if we have snow.

So that's those are the two questions I get is how big is it and does it snow there?

And what do the students think when it does?

What have you found to be the culture of the campus or the student body?

I remember reflecting when I was interviewing, but every email was said, Howdy.

It does.

Yeah.

And how odd that felt at the time.

But after almost a year here, it feels so natural and to me epitomizes what A&M is about, which is that community service the selfless service spirit that you really respect, your fellow Aggies, You get to know each other really quickly and you're really listening open to listening to new ideas and other perspectives, even when they vary from your own.

And I love that about Texas A&M.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

It doesn't matter what the event is or the venue or the crowd.

It could be light hearted, it could be serious.

If you step up to the microphone and say howdy, you get an entire response back from the audience.

And it's it's it's kind of fun.

It's a fun thing.

It's so effective at starting meetings.

Yeah, it really is.

Right.

Well, okay, so give us a reminder of what your office is all about and even what sustainability means, because I think that's an umbrella term that encompasses more than we might think.

Yeah, I'm going to start with the definition of sustainability.

As Texas A&M understands it, which is we define sustainability as the efficient, deliberate and responsible preservation of environmental, social and economic resources to protect our earth for future generations of Aggies.

And beyond.

The Texas A&M community, beyond Aggieland, our office is charged with implementing that definition, trying to live out those values of that perspective.

And so we do that in a variety of ways.

One of them is measuring our progress towards sustainability.

Another is providing funding for students, staff and faculty ideas to advance sustainability in the workplace, in on the campus life and in the community and beyond.

And then we also educate about what does it mean when we think sustainability.

A lot of people start with recycling trash bins, thinking that recycling is all that is sustainability.

But just walking into your office today, I saw a great example of sustainability.

You have a wellness room just outside of the room here where you can go and maybe you have a breastfeeding mother and she can go and pump or someone needs a mental health break and they can sit in that room that wellness is also sustainability.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So, so it really is a huge term that brings in a ton of things.

It's all encompassing.

We look at it from the lens of environmental, social and economic and we really need to look at all three of those things together to find that really sustainable society and sustainable land.

Okay, So here's a pop quiz.

I want you to tell me who said this, and I think you're going to know the answer immediately.

Every Aggie should contemplate ways to provide hope and change with respect for the tenets of sustainability and through acts of selfless service to the Texas A&M community.

Who said that?

I think Scott Shafer said that.

He did say that.

Tell us who Scott Shafer is.

So Scott Shafer is the director of Community Engagement and Enrichment.

We sometimes get our acronym acronyms Messed Up, but he is my boss's boss, he oversees our department and is in the office of the president.

And that's where our unit falls.

Can you break down what he said in chunks a little bit that every Aggie should contemplate ways to provide hope and change with respect for the tenets of sustainability and to acts of selfless service to the A&M community.

Can you can you look at that in chunks or do you need to take that in its entirety?

I think you can look at it in chunks and build on it over time.

So what we do in our office and what we focus on is identifying what students are interested related to sustainability and then helping them to see how their individual actions in that area.

For example, we have a student on campus who's really focused on bird strikes and windows that are killing birds as they're running into windows and that environmental impact of losing birds.

That is a really kind of specific niche sustainability issue.

And he has taken that to give his time and start having conversations with high leadership and operations to change the way we design buildings or to put fitting on glass so that the birds can see the glass and we protect our natural environment and these creatures that we love.

So he found something that he really cared about and shared a story of hope, of how things could change.

And Aggieland listened.

And we're starting to see those changes, talked about on campus at the highest level of our operations team.

So I guess this must have been a problem of a magnitude that merited attention, but it's not anything I've thought about whatsoever.

Well, Texas A&M is all of its students ideas put together.

And so to me, every student is coming with something else that they care about, about this community and that they want to see better and improved.

And so sometimes it's the student bringing what they care about to the attention of leadership that gets the most traction.

Because ultimately we're here to serve our students and the Office of Sustainability.

And I think really every other person in leadership I've talked to since starting here really believes in that tenant, that if a student has a concern and they're willing to do the research and put in the time that we're going to work as best we can to improve the situation and address those concerns.

So I've visited a couple of times with your boss and my friend Kelly Wellman, who I think really is the OG of sustainability at Texas A&M University.

And when I came to Texas A&M and I graduated in 1991, so I've been here a while, sustainability was not really something that I had an awareness of as a mindset or a priority.

I'm guessing now with the kinds of ideas that come to you guys, that there might even be an expectation from incoming students that A&M has a very robust sustainability endeavor or component.

Do you find that as you're talking to these students?

Yeah.

Students definition and thoughts of sustainability extends way beyond recycling.

Now to things that I don't even think about as someone who is schooled in this.

About ten years ago has been a professional in in the field for ten years.

They're coming up with ideas of thinking about sustainability that are even beyond what I learned in school and that so interesting to see when we survey the Aggie community, we also hear that this is really important to them.

So there are some stats in our highlight report that talk about the percent of Aggies who think it's important for Texas A&M to use renewable energy or increase the amount of renewable energy or make the campus more resilient to extreme storms and the effects of climate change to become more resilient.

Aggies are coming in with that expectation that the university is doing something and they're looking for ways to engage it and build their passion and find other people who feel the same way.

How do you how do you find out how do you survey students across this campus to figure out what their preferences and expectations are?

So far, our annual Stars report we are what?

Excuse me?

We work with the Office of Institutional Effectiveness to do a representative sample survey of the entire Aggie community.

So they pull a sample set out and then we ask for responses around sustainability literacy.

So what do you know?

Related to the definition of sustainability?

And then asking them how important different aspects are?

And then we use that information and it's available in our Stars report too.

It's available in our Stars report, and then we use it to inform our programing.

The other way we do that is I have eight interns, undergraduate interns on my team, and they do a lot of our campus outreach and engagement activities and they pick the topics that they want to focus on.

I just help to group them together in teams.

Yeah.

So in past discussions with Kelly, she has talked about the Stars Report, A&M's Institutional, Sustainability Performance is rated through the Stars program, which you can tell us what that stands for.

And according to your latest report, what your level of recognition is.

Yeah.

So Star stands for Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System.

I'm going to throw another acronym in there.

It's a program by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Okay.

Lots of letters in there.

We just call it stars.

But what that does is it allows higher education institutes of any size to rank themselves compared to other institutions.

And they get either a bronze, silver, gold or platinum rating.

Texas A&M is gold.

Is this our first time as a gold?

It is not.

We have been gold since 2017.

Okay.

So our score in 2024 was 68.03.

That's a slight drop from previous score, but it's still a good improve.

It's still a good metric of things that are changing in the institution.

We saw some improvements in other in many areas related to energy, in particular.

And I think the best news is that t u is lower than us now.

67.8.

That's what I'm talking about.

Yeah.

Horns down there.

We are a sustainability school.

That's who we are.

No, that's great.

So is this a sort of a self-assessment that gets you the rating or is there some committee that comes in and does an audit of some kind?

It's self-reported, but there is an audit of those of a certain amount of your submission categories by ASHI every year.

And we actually receive a 97.7% data accuracy award, one of the top ten institutions for data accuracy in what we submit to them.

The first time is accurate.

In our last report, they had one finding, which is unfortunately, I linked an old PDF.

That was the finding that's that was your strike against you.

But that's what stopped us from getting 100%, which no other institution had.

gosh.

Well, I'd say that's doing pretty well.

Do you want to talk about some of the specifics within that Stars report that might be of interest to us?

Yeah, I talk about some of the things that I'm proud of.

Sure.

An important thing to know about stars is that it looks at holistic sustainability.

So we measure things in four areas academics, engagement, operations and planning and administration.

I'll give an example in each of those so you can see the types of things that might fall in there under academics.

One of the pieces that I would say I am most proud of is the work of the Texas A&M University Libraries Group.

They're active advocates for open access to textbooks and research, making sure that research can get into the hands of people without the need to pay.

So not facing a paywall to access great Texas A&M research and also to make sure that student learning material is available at either free or low cost.

So through programs related to purchasing course materials for the library research course reserves, they've actually been able to save students $2.2 million by allowing by having those course materials either free, open access or available at the library that you can check out.

That seems like a big deal.

Yeah, it's about making it more affordable and sustainable.

To be a Texas Aggie and to afford scholarship.

Right.

What else do you have?

Yeah.

In the engagement side of things, I think what I would point to there is the fact that, let's see, I would say that there's something in A&M culture that's happening maybe just a little bit a little bit later this month on the 23rd of March.

The big event.

yeah.

And through the big event, Aggies have volunteered over 1.1 million hours of service since 1982, and 46% of our student body participates in documented community service keyword.

They're documented.

Sure.

I think it's a lot more than that, because this is really part of the Aggie spirit and the Aggie tradition of selfless service and that value.

So giving back to the community through community service, a big part of sustainability.

Now that third category is operations.

And our big win here in 2024 is that we entered into a power purchasing agreement with Samson Solar and now 50 megawatts of our electricity comes from clean, renewable electricity.

That means that's about nine and a half percent of our total electricity use is from renewable sources.

And in just one year that reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 10%.

No kidding.

So is there a goal to increase that?

The goal for the institution is to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources.

So we'll continue to kind of move in that direction.

But what's important is also finding an economic balance.

We want to have affordable energy, and this power purchasing agreement that utility service has entered into was the most economic option to so often sustainability actually does go hand in hand with economics.

Sure.

Yeah.

There needs to be sometimes a diverse portfolio in that regard.

Yeah.

And then I'll point to one thing in the last category, planning administration.

So the stuff that's maybe happening at in the President's office or in the background of administrators and my favorite tidbit in this report, I think overall is the fact that Texas A&M has committed $1.1 million annually for the next ten years to address food insecurity on our campus to make sure that no Aggies go hungry.

Right.

And I think that really goes back to us striving to make being an Aggie accessible and affordable, and that is also sustainability.

So hopefully that helps people broaden their perspective of what sustainability is.

And it is a lot more than just recycling.

Yeah, I don't think a lot of us think about food insecurity even being a thing here at Texas A&M.

I think it exists to some degree at almost every university campus, but it is a thing here.

So that's that's wonderful that that kind of investment is being made.

Well, and it's often student led the 12th Can Food pantry is a student organization student led initiative to have a food pantry on campus.

And then we see pocket pantries pop up in so many different places in different departments so students can have quick access to food when maybe they've run out of meal swipes for the month.

Right.

Right.

If you just tuned in I'm Jay Socol you're listening to Brazos matters.

So my guest today is Danielle Laperriere, sustainability manager with Texas A&M Office of Sustainability and Campus Enrichment.

Okay, so in this 2020 for sustainability highlights report, there were a number of things that caught the eye of Brazos Matters student content contributor Gracie Dolan.

And so I thought her questions and curiosities were pretty sharp.

I want to throw a couple at you.

72% of students primary mode of transportation is sustainable.

That's what it says in the report.

And and Gracie said, really, you know, so can that really be true?

And, you know, what constitutes sustainable commuting options?

Yeah.

So sustainable community options are anything except driving by yourself in your personal vehicle.

So if you pick up your roommate on the way, the campus, but you're still driving, that's more sustainable than driving alone.

It takes less resources in terms of parking spaces.

You save money on gas.

Hopefully you can share those costs and there's fewer cars on the road and less greenhouse gas emissions and tailpipe emissions.

But beyond that, it's also how many people use our Aggie spirit bus at the start of the semester.

It's absolutely packed.

It gets a little nuts as everyone's trying to figure out their way around that first week.

It's walking, biking, rolling on, on kind of motorized vehicles like lots of those scooters, scooters and E skateboards and all the things.

So really anything except driving by yourself in a car.

72%.

Yeah.

Students are trailblazers.

We measured that set for staff and faculty and we're not as close.

Okay.

Okay.

Another question from Gracie.

80% of construction and demolition waste produced by the university is diverted from landfills.

80%.

How does that happen?

Yeah.

Really good planning by our university architect and utilities and energy services groups.

The biggest thing is we're thinking about what materials there are that are going into construction, what materials is going through demolition, and making sure they have a diversion path while they're planned.

That number has actually slipped over the past couple of years.

We've seen it grow up at like go down, down, I guess get worse just by a few percentage points because we're measuring it as accurately as possible.

And also it gets harder as we have more and more materials going in our buildings to find different ways to divert them.

Who are your primary partners in that endeavor?

University architect would be a big one.

There.

Some of the construction here is also with the university system.

But really what's great about sustainability is, yeah, we have an office of three, but sustainability to be successful needs to be embedded in every department on campus and every job as a sustainability job.

If you turn on that mindset to think about what's the life cycle cost of this building or this printer that I'm going to buy, what am I going to do with it when it's done?

Is there a place, a way to reuse it, Repurposing, or how are the decisions I'm making affecting people in their wellbeing?

And you touched on some of this, but, another question from Gracie was that about the part that says Texas A&M strives to make the Internet accessible and affordable, accessible and affordable and the curiosity is how and how does a push towards students graduating without loan debt support sustainability?

Yeah.

So stats that maybe Gracie saw in the report is that we have a 76% graduation rate for low income students and 63% of our students are graduating without student loan debt.

We would like to see those numbers grow higher because if students are entering the workforce without student loan debt, they're more likely to be able to go into careers that they deeply care about and aren't stuck into maybe just paying the bills.

It also lets them do what you're supposed to do in university.

I think personally explore different opportunities and not just be thinking about the paycheck that comes after.

Certainly we all need that paycheck after, but there's a little bit of exploration that I think happens in universities that's really important to help us ensure that Aggies can access and then also make sure that we're a great first gen school and often first gen students are lower income students.

So making sure that the fact that they're first generation or lower income isn't a barrier to accessing a great education at Texas A&M.

Yeah.

How many students have we known or come across who have to make that deal with themselves?

Like, I'd really like to study this, but my parents want me to study that.

And so I'll I'll work at that for ten years and then, you know, maybe I can cross over and go back into doing what I'm passionate about.

Yeah, I don't think it's as clear a trade off.

And we see students come through our internship program who come in maybe studying something that their parents said, You should study this.

It's a really great career path economically.

And then they do it.

They get involved with our internship program, and then they start to see ways that, I can do this, and I can think about this from a sustainability perspective.

And that creates a value proposition for me as a unique hire in this field.

I'm thinking about business management from the perspective of sustainability, and I know about lifecycle assessment and all of a sudden it actually opens more doors for them.

Well, integrating their passion into that career path.

Now, I think you alluded to this without using the name towards the beginning of our conversation, but talk about the Aggie Green Fund and what that is and what it's meant to do.

Yeah.

So the Aggie Green Fund is a grant giving organization on campus that is housed within our office and managed there, and it gives away major and micro grants to students, staff or faculty who have an idea that would improve the social, economic or environmental sustainability of campus.

So micro grants gives you $3,500 to implement those ideas.

Major grants can be upwards of $100,000 to implement those ideas.

What's great about the Aggie Green Fund is since its inception, it's given away $2.8 million and the grants are voted on by a group of students and advisory committee, primarily made up of students.

So students have the final say in who gets that funding.

And our office just supports by providing the grant structure so that they can review those applications effectively.

Now, the the initiative that you mentioned that a student had about trying to reduce or prevent bird strikes.

Did that fall under the Aggie green fund?

It actually didn't.

We would encourage that student to apply in the future.

It's they are a phenomenal student.

And if you check our social media page, you'll hear the story about bringing it to President Welsh writing a letter to address that that concern.

And we'll have a follow up in the weeks to come that talks about what the president's response has been.

And it's been positive, really proud of that student for sharing what they had learned and asking for our response in a very collaborative and effective way.

We have talked in those conversations with administration to potentially apply for Aggie Green Fund to pilot some of the ideas that are coming out of those conversations.

And so that's a great application of the Aggie Green Fund.

Other applications could be a water bottle refilling station.

One of the number one things we fund on campus and I think there's one just outside your office.

There is.

And the students and staff love it.

Yeah.

As as our time starts to draw down to the very end, I wanted to make sure you had a chance to talk about April being Earth Month.

Right.

And then.

And then there is a day within April that is specific to what you do here on campus.

Yeah, we'll get into campus Earth Day as the biggest or pinnacle event of Campus Earth Month, which happens April 16th in Rudder Plaza.

From 10 to 1 p.m., students can come out and engage with our interns, do different interactive tabling activities and learn more about sustainability.

You also can get a free T-shirt and reveille will be there.

That's all you need to say.

T-shirt and Rev.

Yes.

So you can have photos with Rev for at least an hour in there.

We also have some live entertainment.

It's a really fun time in Rudder Plaza.

Yeah, I think we at KAMU have been part of that in the past.

I think we plan on joining to you again because it is so much fun and we get to interact with so many students, with so many different interests.

It's just it's good for us and we like partnering with you guys.

Yeah.

Last time we had students letting you try Trick Cricket's sorry as an alternative protein, so trying some bugs to eat.

We had an activity on gerrymandering, a fast fashion display and pollinator matching activity.

They're all really engaging.

A lot of fun, a great place to kind of come out and learn.

And all of our events you can find at tx.ag/earthmonth.

Okay, that's the place to go.

Danielle, we really appreciate you being here with us and excited that you are officially at Texas A&M University and you get to say howdy everywhere you go and we hope you'll come back.

Well, thank you so much, Jay.

It's been a pleasure.

And I hope anyone listening that's interested in sustainability reaches out to our office to learn more.

That sounds perfect.

Danielle Laperriere, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you.

Brands This Matters is a production of Aggieland's Public Radio 90.9 KAMU FM, a member of Texas A&M University's Division of Marketing and Communications.

Our show is engineered and edited by Matt Dittman All Brazos Matters episodes are available on YouTube and on podcast platforms like Spotify, Apple, iHeart and Amazon, also on the NPR app and on the KAMU website.

We would love for you to rate and review and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Thank you again for listening to Brazos Matters.

We hope to catch you next time.

Have a great day.