Becky Chambers Hennessy, writer of R&D World magazine, wrote a Q&A style piece on UIUC's "Winning Streak Award" for the International Freezer Challenge. The piece contains answers from Deborah S. Katz-Downie, Martin Gruebele, and Paul Foote. The piece can be found here.

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.

Tony Mancuso, the Communications and Public Affairs Director, has requested updates on the progress of Professor Sinha and Professor Zhang's 2018 Campus as a Living Lab seed-funded projects for the iSEE website and the iSEE annual report.

Professor Zhang sent updates for this project per Avery Maloto's request to update the iCAP Portal. Pictures were included in the update but there was an issue determining the status of the funding. 

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.

ArcGIS created an interactive map displaying the information of farms across the State of Illinois. The farms displayed on this map offer direct sales of meat and produce to local markets and consumers on-site.

See the ArcGIS Story Map for Local Food.

Register now to join the International Freezer Challenge to solidify the Illinois research community's first place track record in cold-storage sample management. Share your efforts and keep the campus at number one!

The Fall 2020 iSEE Quarterly Update (iQ) was released with the following message from Madhu Khanna, the Interim Director of iSEE:

Dear Colleagues,

Attached, please find attached the Fall 2020 “iQ” – the quarterly update from the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE).

It has been two months since I became interim director of ISEE.  It has been exciting to see ISEE bring in multimillion-dollar research grants, launch a new research initiative in regenerative agriculture, and help coalesce sustainable agriculture research on our campus during this period.

Our Certificate in Environmental Writing has engaged students in making insightful contributions to a new issue of Q Magazine. We have also expanded our opportunities for education and scholarly discourse with several online events, including those on nuclear energy and geothermal energy research.

We formally launched the new Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP 2020) on Oct 20, 2020. This ambitious plan is the result of the hard work of campus sustainability folks who worked hand-in-hand with Facilities & Services and incorporated the vision of hundreds of students, faculty, staff, administrators, and community members into a plan for the next five years and beyond — all the way to carbon neutrality no later than 2050!

I am so grateful to Evan Delucia for his efforts over the first seven years as the first director of our Institute. He has left iSEE as a vibrant part of the Illinois community, and I am working with our outstanding ISEE staff to expand upon the work already begun — as evidenced in this six-page update.

Please take a quick look at those updates and more in “iQ.” For more regular news, please sign up for our E-newsletter at https://illinois.edu/fb/sec/5031776.

Wishing you a successful end to the fall semester,

Madhu