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We interview sustainability leaders across industries to learn what they are working on and how they are steering their companies toward a climate-friendly world.
Alex Lassiter - 00:00:12:
Welcome to Open Source Sustainability. I'm Alex Lassiter, the CEO of GreenPlaces. On this show, I talk with sustainability leaders to learn how companies are adapting their business models to be in line with sustainability goals. We believe sustainability has to be open-source to be successful and these leaders have offered us a glimpse inside their strategies in the hopes that we can all move forward together. We are fascinated by some of the unique challenges these sustainability leaders face and are excited to dive deeper. In this episode, we speak with Tina Bessias, Sustainability Coordinator at Durham Academy, the private K through 12 School in Durham, North Carolina is training the next generation of climate champions by educating kids on carbon footprints, recycling, composting, and sustainability. By learning about these concepts at an early age, students build ecofriendly habits that they can continue for the rest of their lives. And I'm excited to be talking with Tina about how the school is practicing what they teach. Well, hi Tina, welcome to the podcast. We're so excited to have you. Thank you for joining, especially with Earth Month coming up here where we're very excited to get the chance to talk to you, I guess to kind of get started, maybe tell us a little bit about your role at Durham Academy and especially how it pertains to sustainability.
Tina Bessias- 00:01:29:
Well, thank you Alex. We are very excited about Earth Month and making lots of plans so this is a great time to get to talk to you. I am a Sustainability Coordinator and an Independent Study Coordinator. So in my Sustainability Coordinator role I teach a class each semester and I get to co-advise the Student Government Sustainability Committee and I lead an Adult Sustainability Leadership Team. So those are kind of the three different groups that all intersect with and collectively organize all the sustainability activities so far at Durham Academy.
Alex Lassiter - 00:02:17:
And that strikes me. When I was in school, I don't feel like we had folks that were dedicated to something like sustainability and I'm curious. I think this is a relatively new thing for schools to start to track and assess and gain visibility into their footprint, working both with parents and students. But how did this come to be at Durham Academy? I guess maybe talk to me through the formation of your position and how you've interacted and kind of how that's grown over time.
Tina Bessias- 00:02:50:
Well, sure, I guess I am a part of an independent school sustainability leaders group that just meets on Zoom once a month just to sort of share experiences and chat about stuff. So I know we're not the only ones, but a lot of the schools that have been doing this for a while are Northeastern Boarding Schools. So it seems to be newer in the Southeast and in day schools. And I think public schools also in some places have really exciting things going on. Like in Hanover, New Hampshire. They have a really cool collaboration with Dartmouth College. And so so there are sort of pockets of this, I think, around. But it started for me and for Durham Academy in the fall of 2018, when the IPCC published its report on keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees. And the idea of cutting carbon emissions by 50% in ten years seemed like a tall order, but a clear one. My school, Durham Academy, is a K-12 school, so I love the fact that a ten year span is just really clear to us. And we can go down to the lower school and see the second graders. We can say, okay, when these children look like the seniors, we need to have made dramatic changes. And I asked around with my colleagues and everybody about what's Durham Academy's response to this IPCC report going to be. And I didn't find a whole lot of people that were paying a lot of attention to it, but some of us, there were some students and some faculty members who were interested. And so we formed a study group, and that was the beginning in November of 2018. And then in February, we had a seminar. It was really cool because it turned out that one of the authors of that report was a parent of students in our school. So Drew Shindell came and spoke to us about the process of creating this giant report. And it was just amazing to hear all the detail, and we were just learning and educating ourselves about climate change at that point. And then the students went to this leader of student government, the president of the student body, and said, we want to have an elected leader of sustainability next year. And that kind of led to a reorganization of student government with a number of different committees, instead of a conventional, like, president, vice president, secretary, treasurer kind of structure. So the next year, we had our first elected leader in the fall of 2019 of a Student Government Sustainability Committee. And we just had a lot of excitement around that and have continued to since then. And we've kept on adding things. I guess the following year, I was asked to be a Sustainability Coordinator, and that was a big surprise to me. I was an English teacher at the time, a part time English teacher, so I was only teaching one or two courses. I was asked if I'd be willing to shift over and do this. So our Administration really came up with that. I didn't, and they have been very supportive along the way. And we are now working towards a clear set of goals and metrics that we hope the school will commit to in the next few months.
Alex Lassiter - 00:06:17:
That's amazing. That's amazing. I know we got to work with you over the last year of kind of like building out your sources of emissions and understanding a baseline of where you are. And as I understand it, you're using the GreenPlaces platform to essentially kind of set and track those goals. How important is tracking to this? There's the behavioral changes that you're doing. Obviously, you spent years putting together strategies and stuff, but maybe talk to me a little bit about the importance of clear reporting and tracking as you kind of reach your goals.
Tina Bessias- 00:06:50:
Yeah, we are really excited to have the GreenPlaces report of our greenhouse gas emissions and understand the sources of them and where they're coming from. But we're also aware that we can do better on the data, get more precise about our data gathering, and being able to measure progress is key. I mean, without that, you don't really have goals. You're just doing stuff and flailing around. And we've spent a few years at that, and that's great, but we are really ready to make progress that we can measure, and that involves tracking. So that's kind of a next step. We're almost there, but not quite at that phase yet. So doing the integrations and getting clear metrics in place is going to be key to, I think, serious progress as opposed to just sort of nibbling around the edges of it.
Alex Lassiter - 00:07:46:
Sure, that makes total sense. And for those of us who aren't as familiar with the sustainability profile of an independent school, could you talk to us a little bit about where do emissions come from at a school like Durham Academy? And I know you're still working on finalizing some of your goals, both medium-term and long-term, but could you talk to us a little bit about how you're approaching this problem? And what are the things that you've at least discussed of ways you're going to start to work down some of these categories?
Tina Bessias - 00:08:19:
Well, it's no surprise that electricity is our biggest category, but only slightly bigger than the student commute. And we're a suburban campus, actually two campuses, and most everybody drives here. Interestingly. I was a kid at Durham Academy many years ago. I grew up in this area, so I have a kind of long term perspective. And when I was going to school, everybody carpooled, and you could count on one hand the number of students who had cars. And that's changed a lot as our culture has changed around the school. And so now we have lots of parking and lots of people, lots of students in the upper school driving to campus, and of course, children being dropped off at other campuses, often individually. We have some carpooling that goes on, and there are different challenges with that at different levels. In the younger years, you have car seats to deal with. So mix and match, separate morning and afternoon solutions are challenging that way. And in the middle and upper schools, you have different athletics and extracurricular activities and things like that. So I think everybody is a little busier than they once were and a little more intense about their time and those saving that ten minutes that it would take to coordinate with somebody else. We just have so much coordinating and messaging in our lives. So those are some of the challenges that are involved there and the reason that our commuting is such a big part of our carbon emissions profile. Waste is another one that we really hope to work on and have been working on for several years, just without being able to quite measure it, but really figuring out how to reduce the amount of single use plastic and the amount of just trash that we're generating and how to recycle and compost things more. We've looked at terracycling, and that's a complicated one, whether the benefits would be better off just not relying on plastic packaging and such. So we are working along on those and excited to be able to really measure and make progress. I was very surprised by the relatively low contribution of our buses and the internal combustion engines that we own. Buses and maintenance equipment didn't turn out to be a huge part of our profile, partly because the buses actually don't go all that far. They'd get driven much less than a family passenger car or something. We'll have interesting trade-offs as we get into things. Should we buy an electric bus for a really lot amount of money, in our view, or should we change out three-old HVACs on the rooftop of the school or something like that? Those are going to be interesting calls. I look forward to the day when we're in a position to make those.
Alex Lassiter - 00:11:28:
It's interesting because the way that I hear you going about this is not too dissimilar to the way that a business might look at their financial reports. It sounds like almost like an ROI discussion of now that we know the bigger sources, you can make trade offs as to where to focus. And that's really interesting. You hear a lot of times over the course of the last ten years, almost people just doing things to do them. I'll separate trash, I'll implement composting, all these things that we know to be good. But without that quantification, it's hard to know where to spend time. And as things get busier, it's really interesting to hear how you're working through this from a perspective of could we do this or could we do this? What's the best allocation for our resources to be able to maximize our return on the environment? Which is really interesting. Now, you mentioned waste for the folks that are listening. How far does the circus tent go? When you think about sustainability, I know you have greenhouse gas emissions, you've got waste. Are you thinking about water? I've heard you talk at some points around biodiversity. How far does this go? What is the walls of this discussion? When a school like Durham Academy thinks about it?
Tina Bessias - 00:12:45:
Yeah, our definition of Sustainability as we've worked on it encompasses stewardship of resources that does include water, and it does include our campuses, especially. The twin crises that are facing humanity are Biodiversity Loss and Climate Change. So we are defining sustainability basically as addressing both of those. And biodiversity is something that we also want to work on. In fact, we're going to have a course on that next year, we hope. And we have started looking at campus to set goals for how much can we restore native plantings and wildlife habitat within our grounds? There's a really cool researcher named Doug Tallamy who has the concept of a homegrown national park that looking at all the properties around the US. That are privately-owned, which are a great majority, and reducing the amount of fescue grass and all the chemicals that get devoted to keeping it green and rewilding people's backyards and our campuses and things like that is definitely part of what we want to do. It's probably less resource intensive, less expensive than changing up things in our carbon emissions side and electricity, electric buses and changing out HVAC units and all this expensive stuff, but I think still very meaningful. So basically we approach it through those two lenses, through the biodiversity lens and the carbon emissions lens.
Alex Lassiter - 00:14:29:
Got it. Makes a little sense. So one of the things that I love about what you all have been doing is really engaging the students in this. I love the idea of having students at the school now in second grade, being able to see these goals fully mature throughout their education. My school got the internet when I was in second grade and I remember I actually did the official training video of connecting the AOL Internet thing and the library and disseminated it. And I remember a teacher telling me that by the time you graduate, everything will look very different. This is going to be way bigger than you think it is, and obviously it made my career in it and all that stuff. So I'm really, really excited and energized about how you engage these students. So maybe talk to me a little bit about some of the student led groups. What are they focused on, how do they think about this stuff? And I'm just curious of their reactions on it. What's been the response from students as you've continued to up your commitments?
Tina Bessias - 00:15:26:
So I'll answer that about students, but I want to go back to something beautiful that you said about the Internet and changing everything, like from when you were in second grade to when you graduated. And it indeed, I am sure, was a total revolution in what school looked like and how it operated. And I hope we're going to have a similar transformation in this process of becoming a sustainable school. I can just imagine so many things looking so different and we can talk about that if you want to, but in terms of students and what you're really asking here, they have really driven so much of this. And just from the beginning, it's been a really positive, upbeat group and it's turned over multiple times, but that tone has remained and there's just such a sense of excitement about doing real things. I think students and I work most closely with the high school students and they have lots of opportunities for competitions of various in debate and athletics and robotics and lots of things. Almost everything that is not sustainability has an aspect to pretend about it. You get a trophy for something and that's great, or you're debating something, but you're not actually changing a law, you're debating other high schoolers and seeing, in a sense, who has the most potential to change laws in the future if they go into politics or policy work or something. In the sustainability committee, we have the joy, the excitement of making actual concrete change that is now. And that is, I think, really energizing for students. So, like, when they were going out and gathering data in the fall semester and handing it over to GreenPlaces, our partners at GreenPlaces and all, they were really participating in the process that is changing Durham Academy. So their energy and their willingness to do things, and we've done dumpster, dives, we get out and get dirty gathering paper towels from bathrooms, doing a rather long pilot project to change over, from putting all our paper towels in the trash to putting them all in compost involved students every week, emptying the receptacles, twice a week, emptying the receptacles and taking care of things until we could hand it over to housekeeping, get a process in place. And this big event that we did recently, the Sustain In, was really a student creation. We were in class and starting to think ahead about, okay, how are we going to take this GreenPlaces report of our greenhouse gas emissions and get to the point of the school making commitments to change things. And we're not in a position to buy a lot of offsets. We are going to have to actually do change in order to bring our carbon emissions down. And we talked about it and said, well, the more we engage people in the process of developing strategies and that sort of thing, the more willing they'll be to support those strategies and the better strategies we'll come up with if we have a lot of different perspectives on it. And then they get to this point where sort of spitballing ideas in class and it's like, okay, we can stay all night and we can work on this and make a big event and bring in everybody and all that. And that's when I'm starting to go, oh, really?
Alex Lassiter - 00:18:54:
Well, that's amazing. I hear this sense of optimism from these students that to me is so exciting. I'm hearing you could see it, I think, from your reactions on it, but it's just such this level of excitement and optimism about the future that a lot of times you hear is almost more of people are just so doom and gloom and we're never going to make it. It sounds like the students at Durham Academy view this as just a great opportunity to do something and I think that just sounds so and so exciting.
Tina Bessias - 00:19:27:
It is. We do have our dark moments. I do teach about climate change and I think it's important they're old enough to know the facts and it's scary. We have our scary moments and we talk about that and we talk about hope and how do you maintain it in the face of really steep odds. The outlook is certainly very scary if we don't do anything. And so it becomes a matter of choosing the optimistic path and saying, well, it is going to be maybe the hardest thing that's ever been done by humanity to get change the course we're on and to meet these targets to 2030 and 2050 that the IPCC has set. But let's get going. I mean, it always comes down to we can sit in the corner and cry or we can get busy and demand change, act it out, be willing to change ourselves and be willing to really ask it of leadership and demand it because the circumstances require it. I mean, if it's an emergency, we do something. And so I do survey all the 9th graders every year and I do find a high degree of worry about climate change. About two thirds of our student body is at a four or a five out of five level of worry and fear about the future as climate change impacts it. But we all feel better when we're working on things and we have a lot of fun and we are very conscious about making sure we include the fund and acknowledge the daunting realities, but then don't move forward. And we have a lot of support from our administration. The students have been invited to speak to the Administrative team every year since we started this and to the board of trustees a couple of times. And that's rare and something that we all appreciate greatly and hope to really make the most of it.
Alex Lassiter - 00:21:35:
That's amazing. I'm going to go back to this idea of like a sustainable school because I love the tangent we were about to go down, so I'm going to come back to that. But one more thing on the students that I'm just curious about is four out of five is a lot. This is clearly shaping how students perceive probably anything like you said, as they think about these other subjects or these other activities being real or pretend. This obviously is something that's going to if you're a student, it's just something that's probably involved in a lot of the ways that you do things. So I'm curious how you think this stuff shapes how students make decisions on all kinds of things. Do you see it? I'm curious if you see it in the way that how students buy things, support things, especially as your older students, as they think about universities and colleges and internships. I'm curious, outside of the academic setting, how is this affecting this generation of people in how they consume the world that you've noticed, maybe in your experience of seeing students throughout your career? I'm curious if you think there's anything different here.
Tina Bessias - 00:22:47:
Well, Alex, there's nothing like sorting through all the trash the school produced for a week to make you feel pretty icky about single-use plastic. I think it isn't something that we talk about a lot as a group because this is more individual stuff, but I certainly think that reusable water bottles and bags and such are a focus for the students that are involved in sustainability. We're talking about maybe 50 students or so out of a student body of 400 and 450 or so. But everybody that I'm around that is really working with this and lots of kids that even aren't involved are vegetarians or doing other activities that they're very aware of their environmental impact, I think, overall. And certainly some of them are studying things in college. Some of the Alumni tell us about studying things in college that are related to sustainability or entirely focusing on it. And that's very exciting. We have a former student body leader who was, as he describes it, only tangentially involved with sustainability, but he's now a morehead cane scholar at UNC. And he was just and he was actually at the big conference in Sharm El-Sheikh last summer, and so he's had an incredible journey.
Alex Lassiter - 00:24:21:
Yeah, that's a big deal. That's not an easy thing to get to. Being able to be on that stage and being able to meet all these folks that are trying to figure this stuff out and see how countries, for lack of a better word, horse trade, to try to figure out how they're going to get there and who's responsible, is really interesting. That's great that he had that opportunity to do that. I know there was a small group of students I remember that were able to go, and it was I forget how it actually happened, but there was a faculty, I believe, that had access to tickets that donated it. I think the students had to figure out how to get themselves there or raise the money to do it. But that's not an easy ticket to get. It's not just like going online and purchasing a ticket. So it's amazing. So you were starting on a tangent, and I wanted to push into it of this idea of a second grade student hearing about ten year plans and what the world might look like. So I'm curious, what does a sustainable school look like in ten years? What does that look like from your perspective?
Tina Bessias - 00:25:19:
Yeah. I don't pretend to know entirely, but I can just picture solar panels and green rooftops all over much smaller parking lots with a lot more native plants everywhere and wildlife habitat. And I picture everybody arriving at school in zero emissions vehicles and carpooling and lots of changes to the city infrastructure around us that would allow for active transport bicycles and rollerblades and scooters and any other way that people can get to school. And I think we would have much less trash and basically everything reusable. No single use plastic anywhere around. I can picture so much of will the building still look the way they do now? Mostly because I don't see us rebuilding our campus in that time. But maybe we'll be dressing differently, dressing much more for the weather and using significantly less climate controlled control devices, less HVAC energy that way. So I just picture lots and lots of change in how we dress, how we go about our days, how we get to and fro and the kind of environment around us being feeling much more connected to it.
Alex Lassiter - 00:26:59:
What do you think about food? What do you think about what people will be eating? Do you imagine it being more seasonal or from the property? Like, how do you how do you sort of I'm curious if y'all have kind of dive into that. What do you think that looks like?
Tina Bessias - 00:27:12:
I don't think we have a lot of property we could use to grow our own food. So that would be more on the personal side of things. That wouldn't be necessarily part of what we're directly doing, but it would very much be part of one of the biggest changes that I guess I didn't talk about before is that to educate more about sustainability is really the third pillar. Reduce carbon emissions, increase biodiversity and educate at all levels in all courses about sustainability. And we really have inquiries from parents and alumni about that too who are interested in learning with us about sustainability. And in that way, food would definitely be something that needs to change. Our whole food systems are very fossil fuel intensive. Having more vegetarian and vegan eating and more locally produced food would be definitely part of a more sustainable school community. We could say, if not the institutional of the school.
Alex Lassiter - 00:28:21:
Sure, yeah, it makes little sense. Prior to you joining, we had the head of sustainability at Taco Bell and we were talking about silverware and hard plates in every Taco Bell, not having single-use plastics and paper and having a dine in experience. And it was fun to kind of talk about what these things might look like in the future. And so I'm always really curious about kind of how folks envision where they're going. We obviously won't know until we're there. We couldn't have envisioned where we were today 20 years ago in the advent of the Internet. But I think I'm very optimistic about things. But I think it's interesting. Well, I know we're getting towards the end of this, but I'd love to ask maybe one other question, which is, what is something for folks that just aren't as aware of decarbonizing an education institute, an independent school? What is something that you wish people understood for somebody that doesn't really know how this is set up on your side and where your sources of emissions are and they might think this could be an easy problem to solve or anything. From that perspective, what is like the one thing that you kind of wish that everybody knew?
Tina Bessias- 00:29:36:
I wish they knew how inspiring and exciting it is to engage collaboratively with students in this way that students bring a lot of energy and of course, a lot of possibility. They can tackle something in numbers like going and finding all of the product labels on every refrigerator and vehicle that the school owns and fanning out across the school and finding everything and getting involved so they bring numbers to it so that they make things possible for data gathering and trash sorting and stuff like that. And I think that it's a different relationship for teachers and students when we're really working together on a common goal like this. And that is a deeply rewarding experience and I think uplifting to all parties, it gets us out of the climate doldrums and into that place of action and determination that is the basis for hope.
Alex Lassiter - 00:30:51:
That's amazing. I love that. I think we talk to so many people that work in climate and sustainability and it can sometimes feel like this is a little bit of an island. And I hear from you that if you can engage other people, it can obviously can maximize your impact, but it can create these behavioral changes and these opportunities to educate and to amplify what you're doing, whether it's with students or parents or co-workers. My suspicion is with every business or organization trying to do this, they've got a fair amount of stakeholders that would probably love to be engaged. And I love to hear that you all have found so much fruit in that. And it's really exciting and it makes me really excited to be able to see what these young students are going to grow up into and how they're going to be a part of this and be able to inspire real change. So thank you. Thank you so much for joining the podcast. I really appreciate it. And thanks for taking the time to talk us through things. It sounds like things are really exciting in terms of what you all are doing at Durham Academy and we're glad to be able to help support you in this, but just so inspired by all the stuff that you all are doing. So thank you.
Tina Bessias - 00:32:02:
Well, thank you, Alex. It's a pleasure to talk to you and we're very glad to be working with GreenPlaces.
Alex Lassiter - 00:32:08:
Thank you.
Alex Lassiter - 00:32:09:
Thank you to Tina for joining us and thank you for listening. If you like the show, please leave us a review and follow the podcast wherever you'd like to listen so you don't miss an episode. This podcast is powered by GreenPlaces, and if you're looking to reduce your company's environmental impact and reach your sustainability goals, visit greenplaces.com to learn more. I'm Alex Lassiter, and I'll talk with you next time on Open Source Sustainability.