Sustainability
Sustainability Tracking & Carbon Goals
Porter reports its sustainability performance through a national rating system every three years, against a public, numeric emissions target.
The STARS rating
Porter reports to the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS), a self-reported but independently reviewed framework covering academics, engagement, operations, and administration, submitted every three years. Porter currently holds a STARS Silver rating; the sustainability office publishes the full submitted report, not just the headline score, so a specific category can be checked directly.
The carbon target
The university has committed to a 50 percent reduction in campus greenhouse-gas emissions (against a 2015 baseline) by 2035, tracked annually through utility data, vehicle fleet fuel use, and purchased offsets for the portion that cannot yet be eliminated directly. The solar array behind the Fieldhouse and ongoing building-efficiency retrofits (see the campus master plan) are the two largest levers toward that number so far.
Where the gap still is
Heating a Wesconsin campus through the winter remains the single largest source of campus emissions; the master plan’s building-efficiency retrofits target that directly, but a full switch away from natural-gas heating is a longer-horizon project than the current ten-year plan covers on its own.
How this is verified
Utility and fuel-use data feeding both the STARS report and the carbon target come from metered records, not estimates, and a summary is reviewed each year by the campus sustainability committee, which includes student representation.