The principles of sustainability are widely acknowledged in today’s business world, and there are significant efforts at Washburn toward promoting sustainability in university operations and academic curriculum. The School of Business is ready to offer its students a hands-on, integrative learning experience that embraces corporate social, environmental and governance activities. Via class projects, students will explore and work with Standard and Poor’s Trucost data to get an in-depth look at companies’ actions on the pillars of sustainability. Trucost provides data on greenhouse gases, waste, water, pollutant and natural resource usage metrics for over 15,000 public companies in the Americas, Europe and the Asia-Pacific. In addition, Trucost provides tools to evaluate corporate environmental and carbon footprints relative to benchmarks. These class projects will enable students to appraise and compare companies and comprehensively understand how markets incorporate this information to gauge company performance.
Sustainability is increasingly becoming pivotal to delivering efficiency measures (such as reducing consumption of energy/water or reducing waste generation) as well as enhancing employability of our graduates in today’s hypercompetitive job market. Affording our students access to experiential pedagogical tools such as Trucost is invaluable. The database will also be used by School faculty as they complete their own research on sustainability-related topics.
