Streetcar at PSU BookstoreGreen. It's more than our school color.

At Portland State we do more than just study sustainability. We engage directly with the community around us to make sustainability real. Our goal is to harness the strengths of our singular urban university - our new ideas, our innovative partnerships, our academic rigor - toward solving the environmental, social, and economic problems of our time.

 

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About sustainability

If you're encountering the concept of sustainability for the first time, you may be asking yourself what all the buzz is about. When pressed to provide a definition, most sustainability professionals offer some variation on the following definition:

Sustainability means meeting the economic, social, and environmental needs of the present without compromising the similar needs of future generations.

Epler Hall

 

Sustainability is a process. Achieving a recycling rate of 75%, for example, would be more sustainable than a 50% recycling rate, and yet we would still work towards 100%, even while recognizing that we might never achieve that lofty goal. By thinking about sustainability as a continuum rather than an endpoint, we as a University are better positioned to identify our successes while simultaneously focusing on future goals.