This project will update on bicycle infrastructure improvement on campus, which may include bicycle lanes/path, bike racks, bike repair stations, etc.

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.

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.

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.

In 2014, F&S and ISTC began collaboration on a two-phase waste characterization study and waste reduction opportunity assessment through the waste sampling of eight campus buildings and surveying of building occupants. ISTC assessed the buildings’ waste stream and occupant knowledge and satisfaction of current practices.

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).

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.

Bottled water has been identified by sustainability leaders as a significant source of single-use plastic waste on the Urbana-Champaign campus. Dining convenience stores and athletic facilities have been identified as primary locations for single-use bottle sales.

In Champaign-Urbana, more than 20 different food truck vendors can be found regularly circulating through the cities. Many of these food trucks can be found around the University of Illinois streets, students being a primary consumer of their offerings. Businesses, especially those which serve food and drink, have a unique opportunity to address sustainability within their operations. To-go, delivery, and food trucks have the unique addition of disposable products as part of their service to customers.

To be filled in later