A student research team, under Dr. Yuanhui Zhang, will expand the Environment-Enhancing Energy (E2E) research program to campus application by augmenting wet food waste produced through the dining halls. They will first survey dining services food waste and make their findings available to campus affiliates. Next, they will take dining waste and convert it into biofuel and asphalt. This process will reduce UIUC’s food waste, advancing the Illinois Climate Action Plan efforts. Likewise, the project will bring awareness to food waste at a local level.

This AFRI Challenge Area focuses on the societal challenge to end obesity among children, the number one nutrition-related problem in U.S.

This project represents the expansion of the original Illinois Sustainable Food System (ISFP) Tomato Processing Project to include additional produce and grains. Expanded products include baked products from grain grown as part of the Illinois Crop Science wheat breeding program, currants from the Multifunctional Woody Perennial Polyculture (MWP) to produce purees and juices, additional grains to produce puffed, seasoned snacks from an extruder, hot peppers to make hot and wing sauces, pumpkins to produce puree, cookies, and pies, and more. 

This program applyies the Department of Energy's technical expertise to help ensure the security, resiliency and survivability of key energy assets and critical energy infrastructure.

This program funds research attempting to understand the interaction between climate variability and agricultural production systems to develop the plants, animals and management systems that will be robust and productive under changing environmental conditions while  providing the important ecosystem services needed from these lands. 

In FY11, the Retrocommissioning teams completed eight buildings. The Facilities & Services Retrocommissioning Team at the University of Illinois received the 2011 Illinois Governor’s Sustainability Award at a ceremony on Thursday, October 27, 2011. Established in 1987, this award has been presented to both public and private organizations that have achieved significant progress on projects designed to protect the environment and improve sustainability within the State of Illinois.

The ICECF 2008 Lighting Retrofit was the first round of the T-12 to T-8 Lighting Retrofit Project. A total of 52,810 T-12 fixtures were replaced with thinner, more energy effiecient T-8 fixtures. This will incur a total Annual KWh  Savings of 8,630,641 hours. Thirty-one university buildings were involved in this round of the project. The total Simple Payback is estimated to be 2.13.