The Surveying Building was awarded LEED Gold Certification on October 19, 2018. The project earned 63 of a total 110 points on the LEED v2009 New Construction scorecard. The project made significant strides toward optimized energy performance, water efficiency, and a sustainable site. A further breakdown of points can be found in the USGBC directory and in the scorecard below.

The Chez Family Foundation Center for Wounded Veterans in Higher Education was awarded LEED Gold Certification on January 29, 2019. The project achieved 60 out of 110 total points on the LEED v2009 BD+C: New Construction scorecard, giving it Gold status. Along with sustainability, a major focus of the Veterans Center is occupant comfort. 12 of 15 points were achieved in the Indoor Environmental Quality category for strategies taken including optimal daylighting and views, thermal comfort design and verification, and individual controls of lighting and thermal comfort systems.

Campus researchers are installing a geothermal monitoring well in the northwest corner of the John Bardeen Quad during December 2018.  The borehole will be 450 feet deep and it will allow campus to investigate the applicability of using geothermal heat exchange at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This garden engages and trains undergraduates in carbon reduction measures, as it is maintained by undergraduate students in the Brinkworth lab and in the Department of Anthropology. These efforts include composting lab members’ food waste and developing a "Carbon Garden" on campus. The students placed two large no-till, pollinator garden plots on the Southeast side of Davenport Hall in the disused space between the building and the adjacent parking lot. These plots, ringed in decomposed gravel and manually watered from a rain barrel, hold native flowering plants and grasses.

The State Farm Center was awarded the LEED Gold Certification on July 16, 2018, having achieved 70 of the 110 possible points on the LEED Scorecard. Quercus, as the sub-contractor to AECOM, worked closely with Turner/Clayco was the LEED AP on the project.

The UIUC Pilot Bike Share program is a proposal for a two year pilot bike share program. This pilot program will be a 50 bike fleet. It will be using a new approach to bike sharing through smart locks. Smart locks contain all the technology for the bike-sharing program linked to a smart phone. The smart locks will allow for versatility in the type of bikes to use within the system and where the bikes could be located. iSEE is exploring a collaboration with BitLock for the smart locks and Neutral Cycle for the bikes.

Dockless bike share programs began in our community in Fall 2018. Although it is not a service provided by campus, F&S is available to help answer questions about the program established in a collaboration with the university, the City of Champaign, and the City of Urbana. 

More information is available on the Fact Sheet below and in the Frequently Asked Questions in the Bike Sharing Blog post below. For further questions, contact Facilities & Services at bike@illinois.edu. 

There are beautiful native plants at the Chi Omega plaza between the English Building and Lincoln Hall, near Wright Street. These flowers were installed with support from the "Chi Omega Centennial Plaza Maintenance Fund" through the University of Illinois Foundation.

In 2018, the Chi Omega Plaza was redesigned and replanted, using a design prepared by the University Landscape Architect, Brent Lewis.

The Resilience Commitment is "Focused on climate adaptation and community capacity-building to deal with a changing climate and resulting extremes," according to Second Nature.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign took on a leadership role to more actively respond to global climate change when Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson signed Second Nature’s Climate Resilience Commitment in February 2016.