Asheville's prime destination hotel--for pollinators, of course--is right on UNC Asheville's campus. The Bee Hotel is a sculptural installation made specifically for native pollinators to live during winter and lay their eggs. It's a popular attraction for humans, too, and is frequented by community members and local school groups.
UNC Asheville has been an official Bee Campus USA, as certified by Bee City USA, since 2016, and a Tree Campus USA, a designation awarded by the Arbor Day Foundation, since 2018. These designations highlight the university's commitment to pollinator habitats and native trees on campus.
Providing local, healthy, plant-based food is a key element of campus sustainability.
UNC Asheville has three student-managed gardens where classes are held, friends can garden, and vegetables, herbs, and flowers are grown. UNC Asheville's grounds department first established campus' edible gardens in 1995, and they're still going strong today. This produce is donated to local food banks and supports the Farm to Table dinner each fall (more on that shortly!).
Only 10 percent of the colleges and universities in the nation have pledged to become carbon neutral. As of March 30, 2021, UNC Asheville is one of them.
That’s the pledge made when the University signed The Carbon Commitment with the goal of becoming carbon neutral in just under 30 years.
The work towards this goal will involve creating a Climate Action Plan (CAP), completing an annual greenhouse emissions inventory and identifying near-term opportunities for greenhouse gas reduction, making carbon neutrality part of the curriculum, and completing an annual evaluation of progress towards the goal.
You can check out more than books at Ramsey Library. You can also find seeds that have been collected from campus gardens, cleaned and packaged and available to the community to plant to create more pollinator habitats.
Up the hill from the main campus you'll find a the Lookout Observatory, and a mixed hardwood forest featuring trails, research plots used by biology and botany students, and a phenology garden comparing sun and shade-tolerant plants.
The Reed Creek Greenway, which runs along W.T. Weaver Blvd., is 0.7 miles long, covers 9 acres, and connects UNC Asheville’s campus to downtown Asheville.Â
It's not at easy to see as the Bee Hotel or our beautiful campus gardens, but stormwater management is a BIG part of UNC Asheville's sustainability practices. We use stormwater management tools like pocket wetlands, permeable pavement, rain gardens and bioretention ponds to help keep pollutants from entering waterways and minimizing downstream flooding and erosion.
Harvested and stored rainwater is used for landscaping, and even flushing toilets in Rhoades Robinson Hall and the Sam Millar buildings. The Sam Millar Complex also has vegetated roofs, as does Whitesides Hall.
The Student Environmental Center at UNC Asheville is a student-funded, student-run department that seeks to engage students, faculty, staff, and the Asheville community in conversation and action around environmental issues. Â
UNC Asheville students pay a Green Fee, used to support sustainability initiatives on campus. The fee was established by a group of students in 2007, supported by a petition of over 1,000 student, faculty, and staff signatures.
Greenfest is a week-long celebration held every fall and spring. Both include an on-campus workday as well as many other events, including speakers, workshops, and information tables across campus.
The annual Farm to Table Dinner on the Quad brings the community together in the heart of campus to honor and celebrate the land, gardens, businesses that feed and sustain us. This special fall harvest ritual around food and farming on campus recognizes the efforts of our student gardeners, faculty and staff partners, and community collaborators.
Active Students for a Healthy Environment (A.S.H.E) is UNC Asheville's oldest student environmental organization. They focus on raising environmental awareness through leadership development, as well as initiating proactive, progressive grassroots action to make positive sustainable changes in the environment.Â
The UNC Asheville fossil fuel divestment campaign started in 2015 with a passionate and dedicated group of students citing three major tenets for divestment: that our school’s investments should be in accordance with our mission and student values; universities should benefit communities in the long and short term; and fossil fuel investments carry increasing environmental, social and economic risk. Â
In 2016, the initiation of a student-run ESG (Environmental Social Governance) Fund was established under the Student Environmental Center; $10,000 was allocated to a fund to be managed by a hired student with sustainable and socially responsible criteria as a “test-run” to see what socially responsible investing might look like at UNC Asheville on a larger scale.
Since then, the ESG Fund has performed very well and has been managed by four different students under the Student Environmental Center.
The Board of Trustees passed a resolution approving a partial divestment in June 2019, making UNC Asheville the first in the UNC System to take any action to divest from fossil fuels. $5 million (10%) of UNC Asheville’s total $50 million endowment is to be reallocated into a new portfolio with an alternative management company.
The Interdisciplinary Certificate in Sustainability was established in 2019 and aims to incorporate a wide variety of courses across disciplines, including Atmospheric Science, Biology, Economics, Environmental Studies, Philosophy, Literature, and more.Â
The program seeks to give students a broad understanding of environmental, socioeconomic, and humanistic systems through interdisciplinary academic preparation, community engagement, and cross-campus collaboration so that they can help develop local and global solutions for a sustainable future.Â
Students in the McCullough Fellows program receive a research stipend to work closely with faculty and community partners to conduct real-world research in the areas of land use and conservation; urban planning; sustainable agriculture; and resilience and environmental sustainability.Â
Read about the 2022 McCullough Fellows cohort.
UNC Asheville has a long-standing ethic of waste reduction and recycling. Campus Operations staff, along with student volunteers, conduct a campus-wide waste audit each semester to figure out how to improve waste recycling methods.Â
Other waste management and reduction programs include the "Green Office" program, which distributes compost bins and removes landfill waste bins; "All in the Hall," creating one central landfill, recycling, and composting station in hallways rather than in individual classrooms; America Recycles Day; Green Olympics; and more.
Dining waste management programs include trayless dining and small plates to minimize over-portioning and conserve water and energy once used to wash trays. Other efforts include reusable and compostable dishes; and “Project Clean Plate,” which challenges the UNC Asheville community to waste less by tallying post-consumer compost bins and donating food to the on-campus food pantry for waste reduction
UNC Asheville follows LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Guidelines, with new construction requiring a high- performance building envelope and use of high-recycled-content materials.
UNC Asheville's Sam Millar and Whitesides Hall buildings were designed and built to LEED Silver standards; Rhoades Hall and The Woods residence halls earned LEED Gold, and Owen Hall earned LEED Silver certification.
Ponder Hall features room-by-room plug load monitoring and a 24 kW solar array. A second solar panel array was added to the Reuter Center in 2022, doubling the University's solar power production. The 64-panel solar array will produce 37,000 kWh annually, or about 17 percent of the annual electricity needs of the Reuter Center.Â
Whitesides Hall academic building employs a ground-source pump heating and cooling system, a green, vegetated roof, an excellent building envelope, and extensive daylighting.Â
Ground- source heat pump systems provide heating and cooling to Whitesides Hall, Rhoades-Robinson Hall, Ponder Residence Hall, the Chancellor’s Residence, and the Sam Millar Complex, fostering energy and cost savings in these buildings.
Campus currently has painted bike lanes on 6,250 feet of roadway, and the Bike Shop offers free commuter bike rentals, free maintenance services, and free bike registration.Â
To encourage the use of public transit, UNC Asheville offers the Passport Program, allowing students, faculty and staff to access free transportation on the city bus system.Â
The League of American Bicyclists has awarded a 2022 Bronze-level award in recognition of UNC Asheville's achievements in promoting and enabling safe and accessible bicycling on campus. This is UNC Asheville’s first time to receive recognition as a Bicycle Friendly University.
Visit sustainability.unca.edu.
© 2026 UNC Asheville
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)