Appleby College focuses on a climate-positive future

When 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.

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.

Another, much larger project is also taking shape in 2025. Hrebeniuk, who became director, planning and capital projects in 2023, says construction will begin on a three-storey building that will derive all its heating and cooling from geothermal energy.

Principal Innes van Nostrand says the geothermal project makes good business sense. But perhaps, more important in the long run is the thoughtful approach everyone is taking to reduce Appleby’s environmental footprint.

“The increasingly polarized debate we’re seeing in North America is an obstacle to critical thinking,” van Nostrand says. “We want all our students to be successful, but we also want them to be good people with a strong ethical code and live life with purpose and meaning.

“Positive purpose is what we’re all about.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Canada's Greenest Employers winners, published April 22, 2025 in The Globe and Mail. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.