Hi Pete and Shawn—

Zero waste activity this week was catching up on emails. Morgan OKed my proposed updates to the glove recycling page of the iCAP portal (and the PDF flier with parallel content). I had intended to make the updates yesterday but fell ill. I’m better this morning, so I’ll plan to get them wrapped up early this evening.

Best regards,
Marya Ryan

Good morning all,

Austin here and yesterday’s meeting with Morgan White and Sarthak Prasad went well. I reviewed articles on how power plants use freshwater and the ways to reduce their consumption. The biggest factor in water use at power plants is their cooling system. The metric for measuring this is gallon per KWh and it’s categorized by their withdrawal, consumption, and discharge. The different types of cooling systems have their own pros and cons. For example wet recirculating cooling is good because it doesn’t withdrawal a lot of water but it consumes more than the other methods. Then an example of an advanced cooling system is a hybrid system that used air and a cooling tower to combine the advantages of a cooling tower and the resourcefulness of using a dry system. The draw backs of using only air is it makes the thermal conversion efficiency go down and increases operational costs. More details can be found in the attached file.

We proceeded to continue research on how our power plant and chiller plants operate by looking at the water and energy consumption of the billing logs. We plan on meeting with Mike next week to gain more insight on the chiller plants and their water consumption. Then we looked at the piping layouts for the Universities potable and cooling water pipelines.

To further our research I will finish reviewing some more articles on cooling tower water consumption. Then find articles with more detail on how cogeneration plants work and what metrics are used to measure their energy and water consumption. There should be more data on this from different European studies because they have similar systems like ours at Abbott. Lastly I will familiarize myself with our systems by researching the chiller plants and Abbott information given on the Facility & Services webpage.

Thanks,
Austin Jung

These are the meeting minutes from February 7, 2019.

$230,000 of funding from the Carbon Credit Sales Fund was approved for Energy Piles at Hydro-Systems Lab by Evan DeLucia and Mohamed Attalla

Purpose of Project:

"This project will install 8 energy piles in the foundation of the Hydro-Systems Lab on campus, and provide new research capabilities and a geothermal exchange system for reduction of energy demand from that building." -Morgan White (2/6/19)

An email of the approval is linked below.

Simon taught 15 sessions with around 100 attendants total, over the 15 weeks. The sessions were Mondays from at 6:30. The sessions began on 9/5/2017 and concluded at the end of the fall semester.

The manager of the Campus Bike Center, Jake Benjamin, will help us seek another qualified student to teach the class this spring.

On Tuesday, February 5th, the eGen SWATeam had their second meeting of the Spring '19 semester.

Updates on stormwater-related projects were mentioned, including an REU project to organize potential stormwater credits. Some points on campus were remarked as having successful or unsuccessful stormwater infrastructure.

SSC convened on February 4th for the first meeting of the spring semester.

Hello Pete and Shawn--

There was no activity for zero waste this past week.

Best regards,

Marya Ryan

On Friday, February 1st, the ECBS SWATeam had their first meeting of the Spring '19 semester. 

The attached file contains the meeting minutes from the Transportation SWATeam meeting on 23 Jan 2019.

Sustainability is: Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP) outlines a path for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to achieve carbon neutrality as soon as possible, and no later than 2050. The campus committed to this ambitious goal when in 2008 it signed the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) — later to be renamed the Second Nature Carbon Commitment for its emphasis on emissions.

In 2016, Illinois took on an even greater leadership role when Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson signed its sister pledge, the Second Nature Resilience Commitment, which charges campus to examine the vulnerabilities of its landscapes and infrastructure in the face of an already changed climate. Together, these two commitments form Second Nature’s comprehensive Climate Commitment. As a charter signatory of the Climate Commitment, Illinois continues its dedication to being on the forefront of sustainable future planning.

This site is a repository for summary information about each iCAP project, both to share the information publicly and to assist in collecting information for reporting purposes. These projects are organized into ten themes: Education, Energy, Funding, Land & Space, Outreach, Procurement & Waste, Reporting Progress, Research, Transportation, and Water.

The Objectives page is a dashboard of 2015 iCAP metrics. Each Project page provides details and background information. The Map page can be filtered by associated theme. If you would like to recommend a new project or are aware of an existing project that is not listed on this site, please use the “Suggestions” tab to let us know.

Read the approved 2015 Illinois Climate Action Plan.

Good evening everyone,

My name is Austin Jung and I am a senior in chemical engineering with a minor in the iSEE Fellows Program. I will be helping Morgan White and Sarthak Prasad with the 2015 iCAP objective #5.3 water audits for my SEE Fellow’s senior capstone. After the first successful meeting, the following will be addressed through the semester:

• Create a water audit program/process for an existing building that will be the basis for the campus wide water audit.
• Quantify and reduce the distribution and line losses for steam by measuring the steam/condensate loss. Then compare this to the national and peer averages.
• Develop a list of buildings that have and need to have their water fixtures upgraded.
• Find out a metric to measure the water consumption of our power plant and water cooling plants to develop a way to record this data for further analysis.
• Continue support to help F&S meet their water consumption goals.

These will be the main objectives focused on during the capstone and any changes will be stated in one of the following weekly updates. I am excited to do my part and begin my investigations.

Thanks,

Austin Jung