“Chuck: You mentioned recently the patio had some weeds that needed to be cleaned up.  I took these photos today.  The areas in the photo are student garden areas.  I did see someone in one of the garden areas southeast of LAR last week.  I am not clear if she was there to work in the garden or perhaps for other research work.

John: Would you be able to assist (organize some student help perhaps) with weeding in the patio gardens?  Could you also  include the student garden plantings at the main east entry to the building as well as the smaller gardens each side of the drive at Lincoln Ave.?  These are the first areas people will encounter at move in.”

-Wayne Bugaj (07/27/2021)

“Hello All,

Yesterday I did some cleanup along with Sara Mason, a former LAR LLC member who graduated last year.  We pulled weeds by the small beds near the wheelchair ramp and did some trimming in the front beds including the one near Lincoln Ave. Two other former LLC students from 2016 and 17 helped a couple times this summer with some very basic weeding.  The people who started this maintain an interest, but most have let town.  The virus and “student priorities” have kept the regular LLC students from doing anything in the plantings for about 2 seasons.  Hopefully that will change this year.   Basically the plantings are mostly doing well.  They need some weeding and thinning.  A couple spots on the S side of the front steps and SW side of the building have areas where one or two species have taken over.  Some replanting would probably be good there, but is not critical.

The main goal of providing pollinator resources is definitely being met.

Chris Murphy told me in the spring that he hoped to get a faculty member to oversee a few students who could get credit for maintaining the plantings. 

 Anyway things look better now.  We took out 2.5  35 gallon cans of weeds.

 I hope this helps”

-John Marlin (07/29/2021)

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. In December 2017, this project received $10,000 from the Student Sustainability Committee to kickstart the project.

Avery Maloto reached out to Rabin Bhattarai requesting an update for the "Fly Ash Phosphorous Filtration" project in the iCAP portal. Rabin explained that the project ended in December of 2018, and there are no ongoing activities related to the project. 

Dart Container at 1505 E. Main St., Urbana, accepts expanded polystyrene (EPS), more commonly known by its brand name Styrofoam, for recycling. Departments are encouraged to take EPS there to recycle this bulky material. By doing so, we can reduce the volume of waste sent from campus to landfills and avoid the harmful environmental impacts of that practice. There is no charge to drop off EPS at Dart for recycling.

There is currently no central funding source to pay for transportation of EPS to Dart, so departments need to arrange transport independently.

The drop-off location is in a fenced-in area of the Dart parking lot and may be accessed 24 hours a day. Dart accepts foam packaging (except for packaging peanuts), foam cups, foam egg cartons, foam meat trays, foam ice chests, and other foam products that fall within these guidelines:

• Make sure foam has the #6 chasing arrows symbol on it.
• Deposit foam in a clear or translucent bag (large bags are provided at the drop-off site).
• Rinse or wipe foodservice containers free from food.
• Remove straws, lids, tape or any other non-foam material.
• Do not include foam-packaging peanuts.

From fall 2015 until summer 2017, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) ran the Styrecycle program in partnership with Community Resource Inc. (CRI). Ownership of CRI changed in July 2017, and the new owner was not able to continue the program.

Morgan White reviewed the following Entomology courses with Professors May Berenbaum and Adam Dolezal:

• IB 105: Environmental Biology
• IB 335: Systematics of Plants
• IB 329: Animal Behavior
• IB 444: Insect ecology
• IB 451: Conservation Biology
• IB 468*: Insect Classification and Evolution – being held this fall
• IB 526: Seminar in Entomology

*During the review, Professor Berenbaum and Professor Dolezal added IB 468 to the pre-existing list of the other courses.

This project is a significant expansion of the current local food partnership existing between the Student Sustainable Farm (SSF), Multifunctional Woody Perennial Polyculture (MWP), FSHN Pilot Processing Plant (PPP), and UIUC Dining.  Presently the Sustainable Agriculture Food System grows, processes, and serves on campus a variety of tomato sauces (pizza sauce is served across campus) and hot sauce.  Soon, the Sustainable Agriculture Food System will add a whole wheat flour milling line.  It have a very successful and growing program to provide quality, sustainable, and local food products and education to the UIUC students.

This particular project will focus on the addition of a fresh juice processing line that will be able to handle a wide array of fruits and vegetables, packaged into an array of containers from single serving to bulk.  As with the other projects, this partnership has no funding for large capital equipment expenditures, and relies on grants to increase our capacity.  Dining Services is a strong partner in our project and has agreed to provide a grant to help with the purchase of items needed to produce fresh juice products including a harvester for fruit from the MWP site.