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Recyclopedia

In order to effectively increase recycling rates on campus, the community must be adequately informed on what the Waste Transfer Station can accept, and what it cannot. Campus recycles 5 primary commodities: paper, cardboard, plastic, aluminum, and scrap metal. There are a myriad of other products that present themselves on campus, and community members would benenfit from a resource that outlines the appropriate disposal methods.

Recyclopedia was born of the desire and need to offer the community a comprehensive recycling guide.

Project Revert to Earth

In early 2023, undergraduate students Hannah Kim and Sakshi Vaya proposed Project Revert to Earth, with the aim to tackle food waste contamination in recycling streams on campus. Funded by the SSC, the research study aims to understand students' behavior toward recycling and how those behaviors would change if recycling became easier and more accessible.

Track Waste from Frontload Trucks

In 2018, PRI Sustainability Researcher/F&S Zero Waste Coordinator Shantanu Pai began to investigate services which could accurately weigh frontload pans when they were dumped into frontload trucks. Unlike swingpan and rolloff pans, which are individually taken to the Waste Transfer Station for weighing and dumping, many individual frontload containers are dumped into a single truck, and the lump sum is weighed at the Waste Transfer Station.

Towards Zero Waste: Automated Waste Classification via Computer Vision

Funded in early 2023, this project aims to develop an automated waste characterization system that uses recent advances in computer vision to detect and classify waste more efficiently for recycling. It will also create a dashboard with live data on the nature and extent of waste generated at the U of I to motivate the campus community to follow best practices for waste disposal and recycling and to help meet zero-waste goals in the Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP).

Geothermal Battery at Energy Farm

The Prairie Research (PRI), Student Sustainability Committee (SSC), Facilities & Services (F&S), Illinois Water Resources Center (IWRC), Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), and the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences (ACES), and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) gathered on Feb. 27, 2023, to break ground on installing an underground thermal battery (UTB) at the  Energy Farm in Urbana, IL.

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