Transcript
Green Healthy Places: Welcome to episode 89 of the Green Healthy Places podcast, in which we discuss the themes of well-being and sustainability in real estate and hospitality.
Green Healthy Places: I'm your host, Matt Morley, and in this episode, we're in Doha, Qatar, talking to Angela Ng, Director of Business Innovation. She's an engineer by background, and her responsibilities cover sustainability on campus, which will be the focus of our chat today, as well as operational efficiency,
Green Healthy Places: and generally what we think of as future planning. So that's anything from software to the rollout of AI and as a special project overseeing all the new interior spaces that we've been designing for the campus for the last almost two years. So Angela, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Angela Ng: Thanks for having me, Matt.
Green Healthy Places: Let's dive in. You've been working on this for a while. Perhaps a university sustainability plan is is a little bit different in terms of many of the things that might be the sort of classic concepts around how you implement sustainability in a building. So just a sort of overview, if you could, of the type of things that you were briefed on when you took on this role in terms of the kind of campus initiatives that you've been or perhaps able to implement successfully over the last couple of years.
Angela Ng: Yeah, I would say what I was briefed on and what we have done i have been significantly different. I think we, from the forefront, wanted to have a sustainability arm of our university.
Angela Ng: a bunch of professors, students, and staff were, we were living in Doha, which is desert, and we wanted to rise to like the challenge of how do we make our lives more sustainable?
Angela Ng: And so there wasn't, we have a brief from like the university of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh that says, right, like we want to integrate our sustainable development goals into education, research and practices.
Angela Ng: But Qatar itself, there was no strict, right, like mandates. even though Qatar and Education City were also like, we should right like move forward into that.
Angela Ng: And so we were really able to come up with our own framework of what we wanted to bring it into like our campus life, right like which is, okay, we want to look at waste reduction, energy efficient monitoring, right like sustainable procurement practices, and right like what does that environmental education look like. So we did all sorts of things from creating a garden to having compost and revamping our recycling program to write like looking at our coffee pods and seeing
Angela Ng: how we can make that sustainable could we do some carbon accounting within our building and account for right like our flights since we are we have business travel since we are in the middle of the world and we have a lot of expats who travel home every year right what does hybrid cars look like What do our experiential education trips look like? How do we teach students at home, right? So we go kayaking through the mangroves. We go on biodiversity farm tours and plant trees.
Angela Ng: But I've also been able to take the students out to places like Bhutan, which is a carbon negative country, and Norway, where we like this discovered a link between like sustainability and perception.
Angela Ng: And looked at things like transportation with the Metro cards. We looked at research to see what students, staff, and faculty are measuring.
Angela Ng: We did beach cleanups and desert cleanups. We focused a lot also on the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging aspect to of sustainability.
Angela Ng: So hitting all of the SDG goals. Looking at our contractors and looking at what healthy foods that we can get for them. Going on recycling tours in Doha to like follow where all of our recycling goes.
Angela Ng: And that really led to, right, like what are the procurement requirements? strategies that we want on our campus, right? Like for what we are bringing in to have green events and just have general like green guidelines. What plastic can we ban?
Angela Ng: And then just regular events, right? Like we can have yoga events, sound bath, qigong for wellness. We have a group of students, staff, and faculty that teach language, language bridges to our contractors to help, you know, have more equitable education. and yeah, it's a little bit of, you know, making all of these maps for green vendors to have that procurement to developing, right, like these e-way strategies and offsetting our carbon and trying to have a like holistic mindset of
Angela Ng: everything that we do can be sustainable and every job, every person can have a sustainable mindset.
Green Healthy Places: Okay, there's a lot to unpack there. Thanks for that.
Angela Ng: It's 20, but yes.
Green Healthy Places: I think if we take a step back, perhaps I didn't you know establish that in the intro, but obviously and this is a 16 year old building, 20
Angela Ng: it's one but yes
Green Healthy Places: year old building.
Angela Ng: It's 20 years of Carnegie Mellon, so I think it will be 16 years that the building has been in place.
Green Healthy Places: Okay.
Green Healthy Places: Okay, so. Clearly, within the sort macro level, when thinking about sustainability for a university building, there is all the work that happens upfront in design, planning, construction.
Green Healthy Places: All of that happened almost 20 years ago.
Angela Ng: Right.
Green Healthy Places: From everything beyond then, you're essentially sitting in this operational phase, which is why a lot of what you just described, it seemed to me, are a combination of say like downstream scope three type initiatives and on-site operational initiatives.
Angela Ng: Yeah.
Green Healthy Places: Because essentially, that's where you can control, right? You can't go back and deal with whatever materials were or weren't put into the space.
Angela Ng: Right. Mm-hmm.
Green Healthy Places: It's pretty tough to put solar panels on the roof unless you really get into some engineering and figure out how to make that work. So that's, in a sense, those are your parameters, right?
Green Healthy Places: There's some things that are just, you're not able to deal with. You're also not the university is not the owner of the building, right? So there must be, to some extent, the limitations there.
Angela Ng: Right.
Green Healthy Places: So you've got kind of, yeah, you're narrowing your focus to what is within your control and then zeroing in on that, right? Because that's what you have available to you, which I think is quite applicable to to anyone who's
Angela Ng: Thank you.
Green Healthy Places: taking on a role like that with a building that's it's already in existence, already up and running. And yet there's all sorts of things that you're able to do from events to sort of the day-to-day piece of sustainability, right? And was that, did you sort of consciously have to think through that? Were there times where you've tried to almost go upstream a little bit and see if there was something that could be done at the building level?
Green Healthy Places: Or was it just working within the realms of the possible, given that it's one of the many projects that you're working on?
Angela Ng: I think of my job as working out the realms of the impossible, right? Like what people don't already do, right? that's That's what innovation is. I think always questioning why and what if is really important to the job. So why can't we have green events and green procurement?
Angela Ng: Right. I think something that happened to me when I first got to the university, I had previously worked on the Pittsburgh campus of Carnegie Mellon was right. Like, why do you care so much? And also, right. They asked why asked how like,
Angela Ng: they asked how like How could I expect, right, like, Qatar to have this much forward innovation when they were only, right, 20 years old, and Pittsburgh had, you know, 100 years on them. And I was just like, what does that have to do with anything, right? Like, we all have access to the same technology and the same tools.
Angela Ng: And we can really lead the way because in some aspects, we're smaller. We don't have, right, like the limitations of, A large university where everything is siloed.
Angela Ng: Our building is just one building. i can see everyone in one day. And so i'm work directly for the COO.
Angela Ng: So I have, right, like a direct connection to leadership, whereas, right, like in a different university with a lot more stakeholders, right, like it would take me weeks to have those connections or to set up a meeting.
Green Healthy Places: it.
Angela Ng: And so we're really able to go quickly and say, These are right like the thematic areas, the strategic priorities that the university cares about and kind of just run with it.
Green Healthy Places: So then there was, just to clarify the structure between the, let's say the head office, so Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, USA, and the Qatar Outpost is is essentially a sort of yeah spin-off of the core university.
Green Healthy Places: So there were some templates, presumably established by the original university back at base that you were then able to lean on. And how has the location itself, because you've you've mentioned it, effectively you're in the middle of the desert
Angela Ng: Okay.
Green Healthy Places: Heat's incredible. The humidity's mad at certain times of year, as I've experienced. How is that how's that transition from you know a sustainability plan on for an older campus building with 100 years of history in the USA translated into the location in Doha? There must have been both, I'm guessing, some opportunities, but also a number of challenges, right? Just based on the sheer intensity of the location and also the infrastructure structure in Pittsburgh in the US than there would be in Doha.
Green Healthy Places: Could you perhaps talk to that
Angela Ng: Yeah. So I want to mention like one other entity that's like important to this, which is right. Like Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar belongs to Qatar Foundation, which is just like a really wonderful initiative started by Her Highness Sheikha Moza, who wanted right, like world class education in Qatar. So we have all these groups.
Angela Ng: auxiliary campuses, right, Georgetown, Northwestern, Cornell also here. and so in addition to having Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, we also have, right, all of these peer institutions here that we can also lean on.
Angela Ng: And so lots of the work that we did initially, right, like while we relied on Pittsburgh to have those strategic partnerships with them, Qatar Foundation also has like a environmental organization called IRFNA that helps all of the universities and ultimately all of the schools around, the eco schools as well, to move forward in their planning for their goals for sustainable thematic actions.
Angela Ng: So really get to rely on our peers for a lot of this work as well, because we're all right, like in this very hot desert together.
Angela Ng: So Qatar in the summer is between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius, which is quite hot and a very unique challenge. Living in Qatar is...
Angela Ng: It's not easy, i would say, for environmental work, right? Like we have outdoor air conditioning. Our air conditioning is on all the time, very high inside as well. And we've definitely made a lot of strides to say, we don't need to, you know, be wearing jackets inside as well to try and like fine tune that.
Angela Ng: And also most people get to see Doha. They don't get to see the rest of Qatar, which is the difference between skyscrapers and nature.
Angela Ng: And the nature in Qatar is really a desert. There's not, we we're also a peninsula. We're on beautiful water in the Arabian Sea.
Angela Ng: But we We don't have forests. We don't have, you know, this beautiful, picturesque mountain range. We're very flat. And I think that's one of the challenges here is people don't see nature in the same ways that other people around the world do where they just look at something and they're like, this is so beautiful. We have to protect it.
Angela Ng: A lot of our students grow up with this is the city, this is the dust, and they right drive from location to location or use golf carts for the last mile because it's just really too hot to walk outside.
Angela Ng: and we have a world-class metro system as well that isn't used as much because gas is so cheap. So, because we're, right, like in this oil economy. So it's really, really interesting, right, like to see what that plays into.
Angela Ng: apart in, right, like in your baseline. I think comparing it from, you know, Pittsburgh is very green place and it has seasons and you can, right, tell when climate change is happening and, right, we'll have these intense rainstorms or snowmageddons, right, like where you can tell that like climate change is happening. And I think in Qatar, right, like it is just very hot. And a lot of people just leave for the whole summer when it's hot. And so we don't have the same opportunities to at the base level say, okay, this is a real problem and everyone must be able to, everyone knows that we need to protect our nature and why.
Green Healthy Places: All of that said, have been able to do a huge amount of work and you've had a lot of wins.
Angela Ng: Yeah. Yeah.
Green Healthy Places: I noticed one of them is the idea of the green flag destination. So you get blue flag beaches and now I understand you have a green flag university campus.
Angela Ng: yeah
Green Healthy Places: So what goes into that? What was involved in terms of the preparation, the assessment?
Angela Ng: yeah
Green Healthy Places: How was the experience of going through that whole certification process?
Angela Ng: Yeah, so it's the Foundation for Environmental Education, which is one of the world's largest environmental education organizations that's based in Denmark. And they have an eco-campus program.
Green Healthy Places: you
Angela Ng: So this is something that IRFNA had brought to us, i saying right they wanted all their universities and schools to be eco-schools, eco-campuses. And, right, like, it just empowers students to, like, lead the sustainable change, bring awareness to their peers and encourage, right, like, operational efficiency at their campuses.
Angela Ng: And we had been working towards it, I think, for quite a while. i think in 2019, there was, like, the first meeting about it But then COVID happened and, right, like, everyone was back to using plastic and,
Angela Ng: you know, one-time disposable face masks, I think the committee really got started again in like 2021 2022. And for about like two years right like they had they and they had all these thematic actions, right? Like they're like, okay, we want to do equity and equality. we want to have a go green committee.
Angela Ng: we want to do a carbon audit and have food equity. and we want like a climate and energy plan and have long-term sustainability planning. And we went to a conference in Portugal, i think 2024.
Angela Ng: And i was at this conference and I was listening to all of these other people talk. And we, for a long time, have been told, right, like we're not doing enough to have the green flag. And that's primarily, it's a Carnegie Mellon In Qatar, right, like our committee was like, we don't have right like our clear goals and accountability. We don't have the data for all of this. We can't apply and get a green flag. It's going to take us another two years.
Angela Ng: Right. And I was at this conference and I was listening to all of these other universities talk. I was like, we have done so incredibly much. Yes, right? Like, we've started all of these initiatives, and not all of them have panned out.
Angela Ng: And, right, sometimes they take a lot longer than others, right? Like teaching people how to recycle has just been this... really difficult project for us. And we measure all of the waste data every day and we measure contamination and stuff like that. And or we haven't been truly successful in that.
Angela Ng: But I said to them, right, I want to apply for the screen flag because what it is, is it's showing progress and we have taken the initiative to do it. And so i just sat down one day and we weren't really organized. A lot of the information was in our head, but I sat down for a whole week and I wrote, i feel like 200 pages of everything that we had ever done. I put together right like the last six years of all of the initiatives and we applied and
Angela Ng: It was just one of those moments where right like we got the green flag, which is the first in the whole Middle East, North Africa region to get this green flag dust designation.
Green Healthy Places: you
Angela Ng: was really a lot of you know European universities that were getting it who were just far ahead of the curve. But I think it was just also about like making that commitment and showing that we have made progress over the years. So it was really like...
Angela Ng: validating to like get that green flag. It also, right, like we had this whole application where we written wrote everything down, but the auditors also came to the university and they met with students, they met with staff, they met with our leadership. And they looked at all of the projects that we have done and we showcased it all. So it was quite like an intensive prop process as well, right? Like IRFNA, right? Like our Qatar Foundation partners before they came, right, like came in as well and also did their own audits and gave us all of that feedback. And this is like a certification that we have to reapply for every single year, right, like in resubmit. And I think it's really great because it just gives us the, you know, KPIs to continue doing this work and achieving and moving forward on our sustainability plans.
Green Healthy Places: I think it's quite a common scenario that of a building team, in your case a university, it could be hotels, the type that I often work with, where they're doing all kinds of things and they're making a lot of effort on the sustainability, on the ethical business principles, etc.
Angela Ng: Thank you.
Green Healthy Places: But it's just not... codified or put in a plan or recorded and yet, you know, their hearts are in the right place and they're making huge efforts, but it's just not channeled through one spreadsheet or through a piece of software. And I think that's typically where the sustainability management software does come into play, where you if you can get sort of on board with that, it just helps channel everything through, right? But it's maybe a step, yeah, one step much further down on the path and yet yeah with the certification they're obviously asking you for certain data points and and KPIs. So and what are the main ones that they're looking for? like What are they really going hunting for in terms of the measuring engagement with the sustainable development goals on campus?
Angela Ng: So I think that is a really interesting thing about EcoCampus. They're not setting standards. We are, right? So we set our own goals and accountabilities and our own KPIs for it.
Angela Ng: And they help evaluate it and they work with us for that. So it's not like, oh, right. It's not like the LEED certification, which we also got, right. Like that was like, you need, right. This amount of reduction in your kilowatt hours from right.
Angela Ng: Water energy, right. Like it's, you can decide, right. Like what are your success indicators? So we had survey results, right.
Angela Ng: And understood, right. Like, students knowledge on sustainability practices and their attitudes. We introduced like behavioral nudges and right like looking at contamination rates right like that was what was important for us for our waste.
Angela Ng: I think in terms of like carbon audits, right? Like we said, this is you know, this is the amount of CO2 that we use this year, right? Like, what do we want for the next year?
Angela Ng: And so we really created our own. We have a couple of psychology professors who do research on our Eco Campus committee, and one is also like the Associate Dean of Research. And so we're really able to write like set the right KPIs with that and have those both like quantitative and qualitative measurements and like baseline surveys that can help us plan.
Green Healthy Places: And you mentioned having been through the the lead certification process. Was that based on operational sustainability?
Angela Ng: Yeah, that was more of our facilities team who wanted to get that certification.
Green Healthy Places: Yeah. Yeah.
Green Healthy Places: Yeah. Cool. And then, you know, obviously there's, there's things that you can do that are within your own control. And then there's presumably some external partners that you try to bring in or engage with the local community or suppliers i fix things solve problems for you from a sustainability perspective perhaps What sort of a network have you developed around other green partnerships nearby, if any?
Angela Ng: Yeah. So urna is our biggest one in looking at, right, like our other universities, right? Like I think Georgetown University is also like a really sustainable partner.
Angela Ng: And we developed, a couple students and I developed, right, like a green vendor map. where we looked at all the vendors that we use daily, whether it's right restaurants for catering or it's right like a printing service or a merchandise service for us to give out green swag.
Angela Ng: And we had an email, we had a script. We called and emailed everyone that we have worked with in the past year. We worked with our finance team to like get information This is all the people that we usually work with. And we ask them, right? Like if it was a food vendor, what are your sustainability measures, right?
Angela Ng: Are you composting? Are you using recycled materials? Are you not using plastic? but What are your measures for food waste, right? Like where does your source of meat come from? Sometimes, right? Like the meat comes from Australia or chicken comes from Brazil, right? Like, is it local? Is it organic? Do we have vegan? We created this a spreadsheet that people can sort through that says, right, like this is the distance for this restaurant. They're sustainable. They're organic. They're vegan.
Angela Ng: They don't use plastic cutlery. they When they deliver, do they use right a bunch of motorcycles or did they use one car are they close enough to walk over? So they aren't a having carbon emissions out for it. So we have this whole map. We also overlaid it on top of, right, like a Google Maps API.
Angela Ng: So people can like see in Doha how far these vendors are. And yeah, we did it with everyone. So we also give away a large amount of swag almost all of our events, which is not something that like I truly enjoy. people are like, well, if you want students to come to events, right, we have to give them some incentive.
Angela Ng: Or also, right, like, if you, like, we have to thank the people that, you know, participated in this event. So we want to give them something. And so it's a lot of, like, working with, right, like, the administrative assistants who are doing all the ordering and saying, right, like, what is the lifecycle analysis of this?
Angela Ng: And here are vendors that we recommend. Right. It has not you know always been successful because then there's only a limited amount of sustainability, sustainable products in the country. And then everyone orders the same things or, right, like...
Angela Ng: What is sustainable isn't, right, like it's just greenwashed materials that like, you know, say, oh, this is made out of wood, but it's still, right, like made in China or made in, right, like not made well or, right, like the life cycle analysis of it isn't well.
Angela Ng: And we also have like some vendors who, right, like we've said, make sure it is sustainable for every single person that orders because it's not one central ordering platform.
Green Healthy Places: Thank you.
Angela Ng: Every single a department can order by themselves. And so one person can order something that's sustainable and then the next person gets it and it's not sustainable.
Angela Ng: Right? Like restaurants can tell us, vendors can tell us, yes, we have no, we will not use plastic packaging. And some people will get it without plastic and then they'll forget for the other ones.
Angela Ng: So really trying to do that investigation, going back and, you know, double checking on them, doing like surprise investigations and being like, okay, they also ordered, was it still sustainable is part of that. So We definitely have the vendors that are our favorites, but also knowing that like everything changes when they're shipping changes in the world that also changes like what our vendors get and like supply chain issues.
Green Healthy Places: It's an ongoing process, I guess. It never really ends. you You also mentioned the idea of some of the faculty, the staff working at the university in their own kind of research projects or I guess like the the amount of brain power that you have at your, not necessarily at your disposal, but still like within the university.
Angela Ng: Yeah.
Green Healthy Places: i just wonder if there's, you know, any examples of of where you've been able to leverage that for the benefit of the sustainability plan, like to engage with some of these, some of the professors, for example, to further the cause beyond just the sort of the day-to-day stuff. Is there anything that you've been able to kind of forget get it get a handle on with some of the faculty
Angela Ng: Yeah. So we actually have a research dashboard that is a sustainability dashboard that measures each of the research that the faculty are doing to a specific SDG.
Angela Ng: So we can look at them and say, okay, like this is how many... how many publications that are in right like SDG four is our biggest or SDG seven. And so we have some that are working on right like AI robotics, right? Like for automated data collection and analysis for greenhouse farming. We have hot weather conditions, like automated, it like cleaning and inspection. And then we also have some that are like based on education. So SDG education itself and global citizenship in Qatar that like really measures, right? Like people's perception of Qatar to the desert, right?
Angela Ng: As well as right, like what are their attitudes towards right like the Qatari fauna right and the biodiversity there. So our students are able to, you know, get in touch with these faculty and work on their projects.
Angela Ng: And some are directly related. so we've our students are able to, like for the recycling project, they measured right like the the attitudes towards recycling and like the perceived barriers. And they did the nudges and to see if that changed everything. And then they were able to you know publish this paper at the end of the day, which was really great.
Angela Ng: I think they, there's a lot of opportunities as well to just like really get involved. Recycling is like the biggest one that we have been, our students have been researching in, but a lot of the students, they come back from these experiential learning trips and they're like, okay, I've seen how other places in the world, really put sustainability forward and climate forward.
Angela Ng: What are some projects and some real world experience that I can do to move this forward? And they get to work with, you know, our wonderful faculty on creating their own project or being a part of like a faculty's grant to really drive forward groundbreaking, like sustainable research or just in general SDG research.
Green Healthy Places: It's fascinating. There's this sort of a number of different ways to think about this whole project that you've got there in terms of the day-to-day, the business operations of the building, right?
Angela Ng: Good.
Green Healthy Places: And then you've got faculty kind of innovating, researching, thinking about the future and how to implement new changes going forward. and then you're kind of building up awareness and knowledge in the next generation of students coming through who will hopefully kind of pick up baton and do their part in the future, right?
Angela Ng: and
Green Healthy Places: So you've kind of, yeah, it's's it's a really interesting mix and you're sort of just sitting right in the middle of it all. So amazing opportunities. Thank you so much for sharing that with us today. It will be respectful of your time.
Green Healthy Places: If people want to see more and follow along, what's the best way? do you have a particular page of the CMUQ website.
Angela Ng: There is a sustainability page in the CMUQ website.
Green Healthy Places: There we go. We'll add that link to the show notes. Angela, thanks again for your time. I appreciate
Angela Ng: Thank you, Matt.
