On Tuesday, February 5th, the eGen SWATeam had their second meeting of the Spring '19 semester.

Updates on stormwater-related projects were mentioned, including an REU project to organize potential stormwater credits. Some points on campus were remarked as having successful or unsuccessful stormwater infrastructure.

SSC convened on February 4th for the first meeting of the spring semester.

Hello Pete and Shawn--

There was no activity for zero waste this past week.

Best regards,

Marya Ryan

On Friday, February 1st, the ECBS SWATeam had their first meeting of the Spring '19 semester. 

The attached file contains the meeting minutes from the Transportation SWATeam meeting on 23 Jan 2019.

Sustainability is: Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP) outlines a path for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to achieve carbon neutrality as soon as possible, and no later than 2050. The campus committed to this ambitious goal when in 2008 it signed the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) — later to be renamed the Second Nature Carbon Commitment for its emphasis on emissions.

In 2016, Illinois took on an even greater leadership role when Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson signed its sister pledge, the Second Nature Resilience Commitment, which charges campus to examine the vulnerabilities of its landscapes and infrastructure in the face of an already changed climate. Together, these two commitments form Second Nature’s comprehensive Climate Commitment. As a charter signatory of the Climate Commitment, Illinois continues its dedication to being on the forefront of sustainable future planning.

This site is a repository for summary information about each iCAP project, both to share the information publicly and to assist in collecting information for reporting purposes. These projects are organized into ten themes: Education, Energy, Funding, Land & Space, Outreach, Procurement & Waste, Reporting Progress, Research, Transportation, and Water.

The Objectives page is a dashboard of 2015 iCAP metrics. Each Project page provides details and background information. The Map page can be filtered by associated theme. If you would like to recommend a new project or are aware of an existing project that is not listed on this site, please use the “Suggestions” tab to let us know.

Read the approved 2015 Illinois Climate Action Plan.

Good evening everyone,

My name is Austin Jung and I am a senior in chemical engineering with a minor in the iSEE Fellows Program. I will be helping Morgan White and Sarthak Prasad with the 2015 iCAP objective #5.3 water audits for my SEE Fellow’s senior capstone. After the first successful meeting, the following will be addressed through the semester:

• Create a water audit program/process for an existing building that will be the basis for the campus wide water audit.
• Quantify and reduce the distribution and line losses for steam by measuring the steam/condensate loss. Then compare this to the national and peer averages.
• Develop a list of buildings that have and need to have their water fixtures upgraded.
• Find out a metric to measure the water consumption of our power plant and water cooling plants to develop a way to record this data for further analysis.
• Continue support to help F&S meet their water consumption goals.

These will be the main objectives focused on during the capstone and any changes will be stated in one of the following weekly updates. I am excited to do my part and begin my investigations.

Thanks,

Austin Jung

This project was originally proposed by Mechanical Engineering students for Abbott Power Plant in spring 2016.  At that time, the SSC members did not want to support solar on the co-generation power plant because it uses fossil fuels.  They asked if we could use it on a different campus roof, and we considered all the large or medium campus roofs.

The SSC asked us to identify a building that could have solar added, so I reached out to Applied Health Sciences in 2016 for approval to use the Speech and Hearing Sciences Building.  Since that time, Kristine Chalifoux confirmed that the roof is strong enough for solar panels, due to a previous change in the insulation materials.  Brian Finet completed design drawings for installing solar on the full available roof, and the Architecture Review Committee confirmed the building is allowed to have solar added.  

After the engineering design work, the remaining funds were about $35K.  This fall, we received a construction estimate from Jeff Holt for upgrading the electrical system to handle a 70 kW solar PV array.  It would cost about $42K if done in conjunction with your capital project, just to get the wiring up to the roof and ready to punch through and install panels later.  Rather than ask the SSC for additional funding and an extension, I am returning the remaining dollars and putting this project on indefinite hold. 

The overall campus goals for on-campus solar generation are listed in the 2015 Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP), which will be updated for 2020.  The current objective is to generate 25,000 MWh/year of on-campus solar, and we are currently at about 7,000 MWh/year.  Per the direction received from Chancellor Jones, we are working on a second large-scale solar farm to meet the goal, rather than several smaller-scale projects. 

The second solar farm is planned to be about 12,000 kW in name-plate capacity, significantly more than the 70 kW rooftop array for Speech and Hearing.  Rooftop solar is still an option, and several departments continue to install them at the building scale. The design drawings are posted online through the iCAP Portal, at https://icap.sustainability.illinois.edu/project/speech-and-hearing-rooftop-solar-pvs, for future use.

The goal of this project was to support installation of high density bike parking in an area of campus with high needs for additional bike racks, and provide an amenity for campus cyclists with a unique shelter structure protecting parked bikes from the winter elements at the Main Library.  This funding purchased the bike shelter and high-density racks.  The shelter will be installed at the Main Library, after completion of the MCORE construction work on Wright Street and Armory Avenue.

The most significant development to date is that two buildings have been identified in which the material the team is work with will be installed, one is a single-story building of approximately 400 sq/ft the other has a double height space and a footprint off approximately 1,600 sq/ft that will be enclosed using the material in development.

Hi Pete and Shawn,

Zero waste activity for the past week is as follows:

• I am arranging a conference call with Morgan and the Kimberly-Clark representative to discuss the glove recycling program. I am seeing if Shantanu Pai can join us.
• I have an email out to Morgan to approve proposed changes to the iCAP portal glove recycling page to reflect the program changes that took effect Dec. 31.

Best regards,

Marya Ryan

The new team member of ALUFS was told a summary of goals from the previous semester. A plan was made regarding work on iCAP goal revision for the spring semester. In addition to the original purpose of additional tree cover along the Embarras River, other consideraions were made.