"Pirates Working Together to Preserve and Enhance our Community"

Environmental sustainability is a community issue that requires collaboration among all community members – faculty, staff, students, visitors to campus and community members and officials beyond the university’s borders. It is a value that we must all share and practice every day. The goal is to minimize our environmental impact or “footprint” in order to protect, preserve and even enhance our environment and our community. It is more than an environmental issue. It is a quality of life issue that encompasses decreasing pollution (air, water and land), preserving green space with native plants, embracing healthy lifestyles, enhancing our community through creating more bike and pedestrian paths and carefully planning for development and redevelopment of our communities. It can be as simple as discarding cigarettes, trash and recyclables in the proper receptacles or as complex as conducting cutting edge research on alternative energy sources to help power our buildings and communities.

The University has made a commitment to environmental sustainability through the ECU Safety and Environmental Policy Statement signed by the Chancellor. President Bowles’ UNC Tomorrow Commission has also embraced environmental sustainability as a value for the entire UNC system and outlines these recommendations on page 3 and 32 in their December 2007 Final Report. 

Below you will find some of the initiatives ECU has been working on over the past few years. Sustainability is not a new issue to us, but there is much more work to be done and more information to come. Remember, sustainability cannot be a program run by one group. It takes all of us working together. It takes all of us doing things differently than we have in the past and even sacrificing some of our valuable time and effort. But, this collective effort is the only way to make a lasting and significant change that can transform our lives and those that come after us. Tomorrow starts here and sustainability starts with all of us working together to make our community better for today and tomorrow.  So join in, recycle, turn off lights and computers when not needed, take shorter showers, bicycle to work, walk to a meeting and enjoy the beauty of our campus.