Green. It's more than our school color.

Through new ideas, innovative partnerships and academic rigor, Portland State University students, faculty, and campus leaders are meeting the environmental, economic, and social challenges of our time.

Portland State University faculty conduct leading-edge research and teaching on issues critical to the Pacific Northwest and beyond, including sustainable urban communities, climate change, ecosystem services, and renewable energy. Collaborations with industry, public agencies, nonprofits, and other universities help to advance the development, uptake, and assessment of sustainable practices.

Sustainability is not confined to a solitary department or discipline at PSU. Every student has an opportunity to graduate with a thorough understanding of the complex and interconnected issues underpinning sustainability, while faculty work across traditional boundaries to bring multiple perspectives to real-world problems.

Portland State’s 49-acre campus creates a vibrant and urban living laboratory for best practices in green building and conservation, right in the heart of the nation’s most sustainable city. Plans are now underway to incorporate campus into the city’s first “eco-district,” to be anchored by the Oregon Sustainability Center.

In 2008, PSU received a ten-year, $25 million challenge grant from the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation, in support of research, teaching, and partnerships in sustainability. The grant is administered by PSU's Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices.

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.

Sustainability is a process. 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. Portland State aims to be a living laboratory of sustainability, with our efforts at research and education fully integrated with the community around us.