Sustainable education: an assessment of carbon footprint at UCSI University and proposed green campus initiative framework / Keoy Kay Hooi and Padzil Hassan

As the interest of green business sustainability is generating a lot of interests in the
higher education institution, this paper evaluates the implementation of Green
Campus Initiative (GCI) at the Unwavering Commitment to Serve Intentionally
(UCSI) University Malaysia by evaluating their carbon footprint emission. The
carbon footprint calculation and proposed framework presented in this paper aims to
encourage other higher Education Institutions in Malaysia to implement the GCI. In
order to reduce the environmental impact at UCSI University, the measurement of the
CO2 emission was a very important starting point. The paper starts with the literature
review about the sustainability and implementation of GCI in other countries outside
Malaysia to give an overview regarding the concept. The next section is the
calculation of carbon footprint emission of UCSI University with the primary data
collected from Logistics and Marketing Department during the year 2008. These
primary data were processed with the formulas had been developed earlier and
resulted the total carbon footprint produced by UCSI University in one year. Later
on, the results of these calculations become the basic concept of developing the
proposed framework to be used by higher education institution in Malaysia.
Supported by the secondary data (i.e. literature review), a proposed framework of
GCI implementation was developed to be tested and empirically validated in future
studies. It is hope that result obtained from this paper will provide guidelines for
policy maker and management of the universities to acknowledge the importance of
GCI to create a sustainable and profitable business application.