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 (SSC) to kickstart the project. Subsequently, a Phase II study was funded ($150,000) by the SSC in 2018 focusing on the development of an HTL pilot reactor. Since then, the team has expanded and developed a pilot-scale hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) reactor. This project has attracted external funding from

the U.S. National Science Foundation ($500,000, 2018-22), U.S. Army ($1,175,932, 2020-23), and U.S. Department of Energy ($802,778).