McGill Environmental Policy

The Environmental Policy demands that we question our attitudes, our reliance on resources we take for granted, and the wasteful habits that we have developed, and then rethink and correct what we do and how we do it. This policy was created in 2001 and the accompanying principles were passed in 2002.

Policy statement

We at McGill University are committed to fulfilling our academic mission and managing all resources in harmony with our natural environment. We are committed to meeting our social, scientific, ethical and educational leadership responsibility in actively promoting the restoration and preservation of a healthy environment for the future and in contributing to building an equitable world.

Our commitment to raising environmental awareness and acting on it is manifested in our teaching and research activities, in other services which we provide to the McGill community and society at large, and in the individual and collective decisions which we take to offset the negative impact of the University's operation and activities on the Environment.

We are committed to increasing the University community's awareness of environmental issues, by fostering the appropriate values, knowledge, and skills to enable us to work towards the restoration and preservation of the Environment.

Accompanying principles

McGill University shall strive to be recognized as an environmentally safe and responsible institution of learning, and as a model of environmentally responsible living. To this end, the McGill University community shall make every reasonable effort to:

1. Prevent the over-consumption of energy and other resource and reduce the production of waste, and the release of substances harmful to the biosphere;
2. Maintain purchasing policies which favor environmentally-benign, post-consumer, bio-degradable, and non-toxic products wherever possible;
3. Encourage all members of the McGill community to be environmentally aware and the University's Environmental Policy to be well publicized;
4. Encourage all members of the McGill community to Re-think/Reduce/Re-use/Recycle. Given the costs that recycling entails, reduce and re-use options shall always be considered first; and
5. Seek additional ways of achieving our goal of being environmentally safe and responsible.

The Environmental Policy is also available as a PDF. In the event of a discrepancy between this website and the printable PDF document, the latter shall prevail.