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CANADA'S GREENEST EMPLOYERS (2025)
Appleby College focuses on a climate-positive future
W
hen Laura
Hrebeniuk
joined Appleby
College in
Oakville, Ont.,
in 2013 as a facility coordinator,
she soon discovered she wasn’t the
only one passionate about the
environment.
Other members of Appleby’s
staff and faculty were too. “We
called ourselves ‘sustainability
warriors,’” she says.
At Appleby, we take a ‘hopebased’ approach towards
climate action.
— Nicola St George
Co-director, Sustainability and
Regeneration
Established in 1911, the
independent school sits on 60
attractive acres on the shores of
Lake Ontario, where wide-open
spaces dedicated to a variety of
outdoor athletics are interspersed
among formal landscaping and
more naturalized settings.
Buildings are centrally located
on the site and feature classrooms,
indoor sports facilities and other
venues where more than 800
Appleby students in grades 7 to 12
can participate in co-curricular
and boarding life activities. While
most are day students, 271 live in
four boarding houses on campus.
In 2018, a sustainability audit
revealed issues with the buildings’
operations and maintenance. “It
was clear that we needed a plan to
reduce our carbon footprint,” says
Hrebeniuk.
One obvious target was to
reduce Appleby’s use of natural
gas, which accounted for 85 per
cent of the energy consumed on
campus. The audit, however, set in
motion a series of events that went
well beyond modernizing the
physical plant.
Appleby has a long history of
connecting students with nature
and encouraging environmental
stewardship. By February 2024, it
had developed and implemented a
Climate Action Plan with a
refreshed vision for the school as
“a community committed to
adopting a regenerative lens for a
climate-positive future.”
The comprehensive 12-page
document spells out goals and
timelines for achieving them for
virtually every aspect of school
life. This includes everything from
enhancing biodiversity on campus
to embedding climate action and
climate education in the
curriculum.
“At Appleby, we take a
‘hope-based’ approach towards
climate action,” says Nicola St
George, an English teacher who,
along with Hrebeniuk, is
co-director of sustainability and
regeneration at Appleby.
“Many young people today are
experiencing eco-anxiety, which is
why everything we do is solutions
focused. We want students to have
a sense of agency.”
That’s certainly the case for
students who are finding solutions
to problems that matter to them.
One group launched a project
called WasteZero after seeing how
much food their classmates threw
out after eating lunch in the
dining hall.
They targeted food waste by
presenting seminars on how
uneaten food contributes to
greenhouse gas emissions and by
encouraging people to take
smaller portions to begin with.
The results are dramatic
— lunchtime food waste has
dropped by over 50 per cent.
Others are taking notice of
Appleby’s commitments and
actions. In February, World
Wildlife Fund Canada announced
the school will receive a Go Wild
grant for its plans to plant a
medicine wheel garden. The
WWF has awarded the annual
grants to schools across Canada
for restoring natural habitat on
their grounds since 2015.
Students, faculty and staff at Appleby College work toward the school’s goal of cutting food waste through its
WasteZero initiative.
