Trent University loves marketing their environmental practices to incoming students. The front page of their website is plastered in sweeping drone shots of the Otonabee river and the greenspace surrounding the main campus, which they boast about extensively in their marketing. Trent also claims to be “Canada’s leading environmental university.”

This is a bold claim to make for a university that, as of 2021, was ranked 133rd in the world by UIGreenMetric, an organization that ranks universities according to environmental sustainability. Even in previous years when Trent cracked the UI’s top 100, like 2019, they were still only listed as 5th in Canada for sustainability.

Put simply, this is greenwashing.

Greenwashing is a marketing tactic, used to describe the way companies will falsely ascribe environmentalist ideals onto a product or service. Greenwashing often includes nature based imagery and touting of the latest environmental initiatives. It is focused on virtue signalling, through the often obtuse language of “green” and “sustainable” to imply environmental action that is not actually present.

Arthur sat down with Anne Pasek, an Assistant Professor at Trent in Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment, as well as a Canadian Research Chair in Media, Culture, and the Environment, to further explore Trent’s use of language in discussing its environmental and sustainability projects.

“[Language is] something that I want to encourage people to be incredibly precise about, because the words that we pick are ways of entering or exiting into coalitions,” Pasek said. “They're telling people that we are or aren't okay with this kind of gesture being part of what we're advocating for.”

“The example of carbon neutrality, I think, is one where we kind of brought too many enemies into our camp without ensuring that they wouldn't eat the hens in the hen house,” Pasek said. “We sort of set the target of that goal to be a question of personal responsibility and moral failing in ways that's really helped fuel a huge backlash against the climate movement.” 

“One of the reasons why people deny climate change and participate in reactionary movements against environmental action is because they don't like being told that they're personally guilty, which is understandable,” she added. “No one likes being told that they are personally responsible for climate change.”

Looking at Trent’s Sustainability and Energy Plan, gives us an idea of what Trent deems important in their efforts to be more environmental. They describe the goal of “reducing environmental impact” as “striving to minimize the environmental footprint of the University.”

The concept of an “environmental footprint” is one that has come under fire in the past few years because of a lack of reliable evidence to support the claims made by environmental footprint calculators. Such tools often rely on generalizations and estimations to the point some experts consider it a pseudo-science. 

“Once people started talking about carbon footprints, they sort of disconnected that from this relational piece, and we just started having a conversation about the gigatons of CO2 that are being added to the atmosphere, and there's not really a ceiling to how much we can add, even though it gets pretty bad for us pretty quickly,” Pasek said. “Having this kind of relationless number is just a kind of a signifier of quantity rather than being really terribly useful, because they're all big numbers. Like, ‘Yeah, big number here, big number there’; the information I'm taking in is that there's a large carbon footprint. Oh, no! How terrible!”

One of the goals listed in Trent’s Sustainability Plan is to: “Reduce GHG carbon emissions in operations to assist the province in reaching their target of 37 % reduction by 2030, and with a target of Net Zero by 2050.”

“Net Zero” carbon emissions are an increasingly popular concept to describe the process of trying to reduce carbon emissions created by an individual or organization. The term evolved from the term carbon neutral, based on the idea that by investing in or participating in practices that are considered carbon neutral or even negative—such as plating new trees—companies can effectively offset their carbon emissions on balance. 

Pasek pushed back on the idea of carbon emissions being a particularly good or useful solution to environmental issues and the climate crisis.

“Carbon offsetting has never been a rigorous or empirically defensible proposition,” she told Arthur. “I swear to God, every three years a new scandal pops out, saying that all of these markets are fake. None of these trees are being prevented from being cut down, or are being planted at all, or failing to like, not totally burn in a couple of years.”

The concept of “Net Zero” as a step further than carbon neutrality came out of the 2015 Paris Agreement and the deadlines introduced to try and stop global warming at 1.5 degrees. The UN treaty introduced not just offsetting carbon emissions, but also carbon removal as objectives in the fight against climate change. 

Though these plans may be more rigorous in their offsetting than previous iterations “[they’re] by no means free of many of the kinds of verification and permanence problems that characterize these earlier periods of climate diplomacy,” said Pasek. 

Another point in Trent’s Sustainability and Energy Plan is to “become a zero waste campus by 2028.” According to Trent, this has been a driving factor behind the recent shift to remove all paper towel dispensers from the bathrooms on campus, replacing them with hand dryers. The reasoning behind this shift does not seem entirely altruistic, however, with both the initial signage and press release by Trent mentioning this as a cost saving measure. The Peterborough Examiner reported that the university expects to save $70,000 a year from this decision. 

Trent’s sustainability initiatives seem incredibly focused on the facilities of Trent and what is happening in the buildings on campus, and little focus being dedicated to the other parts of the university, like research or what is being taught to students. For example, the average Canadian academic produces around seven times the amount of CO2 than the average Canadian through air travel alone according to a 2023 report. 

There is no mention of aviation anywhere in Trent’s sustainability goals. Research labs also consume tonnes of single use plastics, including 83% of recycled plastic in 2012. There is no specific mention of labs in Trent’s Zero Waste goal in the sustainability plan. 

Trent has also come under fire in the past few years for its partnership with CGX Energy and the Frontera Energy Corporation, oil and gas companies, as part of their Sustainable Guyana program.

The soon-to-be Bachelor’s degree in AI also raises concerns around the environmental impacts of AI, including the energy use of data centres training these AI programs. 

Generative AI and large language models have been widely criticised as extremely environmentally destructive, on a much larger scale from other types of technology or the internet. Trent’s AI program page has no mention of these effects, or the environment in general. 

There is also no mention anywhere of how the environmental impacts of using AI regularly for assignments or other coursework fits into Trent’s Net Zero goals. As with the environmental impacts of research, Trent ignores the ways which the work students do for the university impacts the environment. 

Trent’s sustainability problems are not a lost cause and its current sustainability initiatives are not bad. There is obviously room to criticize the work Trent is doing but they are better than doing nothing and provide a fine base to further develop sustainability and environmentalism. There are other universities in Ontario that are already making changes that Trent could emulate, such as the University of Waterloo which has installed solar panels on two of their buildings. 

If Trent wants to actually be a leader among Canadian universities in sustainability and environmentalism, it needs to dream bigger and make big changes to all levels of the university. Trent is not just a collection of buildings on the Otonabee river, it is also all of the people that work and study in the university and the environmental impacts they have as part of their work for the university. 

Pasek also has thoughts on the way Trent might be able to become the gold standard for environmentalism among universities. 

“Because as a campus, we are a nonprofit, we can make long term investments in decarbonizing our energy supplies that don't make sense to a for-profit company,” she said. 

“What would it mean if as researchers, we agreed to be bound to use our research funds in ways that maybe encouraged us to emphasize collaboration a little bit more, rather than, like, parachuting into some some distant country to go be an expert about stuff that is gonna be really really hard for us to be meaningfully accountable to? Or if we were inclined to be a little more locally focused on the research programs we advance and the partnerships we build because we aren't always flying everywhere?” she asked.

“I think a lot about mobility,” Pasek said. “I'm often a bike commuter to campus, and our bike infrastructure could use a lot of improvement. We're in this really unique position where we kind of have the backbone of a really interesting downtown to campus bike network. And if we actually got some bike parking and some bike lanes going on the Symons campus, that would be huge.”