Hi Andrew, Jane, Scott, Rob, and Stephanie,

At the last Sustainability Practitioners discussion, Jack Dempsey asked about a Regional Climate Action Plan.  After that brief discussion, he talked with campus leadership.  Mike DeLorenzo then talked with the “IAC” about the idea.  Reportedly, Laurel Prussing was enthusiastic and the Champaign City Manager liked the idea and wanted to get a little more info.  I do not know if Bill Volk or Deb at RPC have heard of this yet. 

What I’d like to do is meet with the six of us and talk about this idea.  We can flesh out the idea more, develop a list of pros and cons, and consider the different options for moving forward.  Jane and Andrew, would you please let me know if you can and will participate in this discussion?  Scott, can you confirm that you are the right person to include for Urbana?

Thanks!

Morgan

The call included Jim Martinie and Kathy Young with UA Payables, Cindy Klein-Banai, Stephanie Lage, and Morgan Johnston.  Ben McCall, Shelby Egan, and Ginger Valezquez were unable to join the call.

This discussion was started through a group in Chicago looking at the travel policy with Amtrak.  Unlike with airfare it wasn’t giving a preference for Amtrak.  Also, even a higher class than the coach class Amtrak is much less expensive than driving, and people may be more productive on the train.  Are there options and promotional opportunities.  Payables was going to look at it and provide us with an update. 

Policy is set by the Illinois Higher Education Travel Board and it is very difficult to get them to change.  Ginger is the representative for the UI with the Illinois Higher Education Travel Board.  They prescribe the lodging limitations, per diem amount, and travel policies.  Can do procedures and not policies on our side, but they haven’t had much luck with change requests for increasing per diem or lodging limitations.  Cindy said that this would be a little different because we want to ask them to reimburse less than for car travel.

Probably need to focus on what can be done here and what we do have control over.  Providing some information to Amtrak and train travel under make travel arrangements.  We can update the pages on the OBFS page. Payables was really focused on making procedural changes with the web-page – Kathy would like to work with someone to put the information on the website.  Kathy will submit the information for the changes – Cindy will work with them to help with that, with Stephanie.  Stephanie will bring Gary Miller up to speed about the policy issue, for the Green Governing Coordinating Council.  Morgan will get a contact at IDOT in support of Amtrak travel.

They were able to come up with a preliminary report that identifies the instances that someone has driven and been reimbursed for mileage between Urbana and Chicago.  That report needs a little fine tuning – by departments.  We can count and sum the info by department with the details.  They will look at instances between Chicago and Springfield, as well. 

I called DCEO's contact for this program, and her voicemail said to call Brian Cattamay at 312-355-2019.  I left him a voicemail because it is unclear to me whether the funding is still available for our campus.  I also asked Dawn to take a look at the video and estimate or count the number of green nozzles they could install at Dining Services.

From: Johnston, Morgan B

Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2014 10:54 AM
To: 'Amy Liu'
Cc: Burris, Marques Javyn; Bartels, Bart A; Kinley, Kathryn R
Subject: RE: Tap That Signage

Hi Amy,

I think you should ask Marques or Katie for the current account balance for this project (water fountain retrofit).  The CFOP is 1-303692-815100-815184-815RET.  Then, you need to get a vote from the SSC committee to approve the change in scope to reflect the # of glass fillers installed, and give you permission to spend the remaining money on signs.

Once you have SSC permission, then we will talk to the individual facility managers for the buildings, to get their approval of any signage.  At the libraries, for instance, you may be able to put a flyer on their bulletin boards, but not at the actual fountains.

Thanks!

Morgan

There are 48 buildings signed up.  There will be a luncheon on April 21 during Earth Week on campus.  The lunch is for celebrating the participants, and for them to invite potential participants to join us and help expand the program.

From: Dorothy Ann David
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 3:33 PM
To: DeLorenzo, Michael T
Cc: Rob Kowalski; Joan Walls
Subject: Climate Change Plan

Mike - I don't think that I ever followed up on last month's request about our interest in participating in a discussion about a Regional Climate Change Plan.  I have asked Rob Kowalski, Assistant Director of Planning and Development to serve as the City's rep on any group you choose to convene.  I have copied Rob so you have his email address. 

The University of Wisconsin  in Madison has a program to reduce polystyrene waste.  They reached out to Ben McCall to get a letter of support.  Meanwhile, Bart Bartels, Seth Rients, and Shantanu Pai suggested we could start a similar program now, rather than wait to know if Wisconsin's funding comes through.  Ben suggested the following questions to consider as a starting point.

1. Where can we set up local "staging areas" in the relevant buildings?
2. Who can move things from the staging areas to a central location for bundling?  Students?
3. Can we identify "local" (St. Louis, Chicago, Indy) companies such as Sigma that would want these?
4. How can we arrange to truck them to those companies?  [I wonder if we could even send them back on the trucks that drop off chemical orders?]

The rennovation of the State Farm Center (previously known as the Assembly Hall) will seek LEED Gold certification.  One item that this includes is the prerequisite that the building have indoor recycling bins placed throughout the facility.  This will be a nice follow up to the first Zero Waste Game Day event our campus held in Spring 2014.

The greenhouse is built, the bin is constructed, bedding logistics are in place, and food waste collection should begin the week after spring break. Ramp up to about 150-200 lbs of food waste processing per week should be complete in about 4-5 months. For this bin and the way it fits into the SSF management plan, we’d never process more than 250-300# of actual food waste a week. This would make for a max range of 7,000-14,000 lbs of food waste processed per year (47 weeks, we wouldn’t collect waste during Christmas and Spring Break). 

If there is any confusion about this PILOT vermicomposting project I’d like to clarify it here, because I have gotten a few requests from outside sources about taking in outside food waste (word spreads quickly). This particular unit is only meant as a pilot demonstration to prove this can be done on a larger (potential campus wide) scale. This 5x16 unit we have is an example of one part of what could be a much larger facility. However, if this is successful I would like to see that facility be something that the SSF does not manage, and ideally in another specifically built piece of infrastructure to house a larger scale process. The greenhouse also serves as our transplant production house. Between the existing unit and managing the transplant production system, the SSF has more than it can already incorporate into its existing management.

That being said, once the system is up and running, we’d love to showcase this to any number of relevant parties and incorporate the data into any Zero Waste policy the campus has. As well as any other sustainability metrics the campus tracks.

See Daily Illini article about the e-waste event.

E-Cyclemania

On March 18th from 2pm to 6pm the Urbana-Champaign Campus will host an e-waste collection event as part of Recyclemania, a national competition to minimize waste and reduce the amount of material going to landfill.  On that date there will be three collection sites including the Allen Hall turn-around, Ikenberry Commons at Euclid Avenue, and a vehicle drop-off behind the ISTC Building in the research park. Personal electronics will be accepted free of charge including anything that has a plug or runs on batteries.  However the event can’t accept university owned inventory.  

In an effort to reduce traffic congestion that is sometimes created by such an event, volunteers will help pick material using bicycles and carts (E-cyclers).  Buildings participating in the event can begin collecting e-waste on the morning of March 18th.  The E-cyclers will pick up that material and transport it to one of the collection sites.  E-waste that is too heavy to transport by cart should be delivered to the ISTC vehicle drop-off.

All e-waste collected will be recycled by a vendor that is R2 and E-steward certified.  Weight of the material collected will be reported as part of the national Recyclemania competition.  Additional information can be found here.

View the facebook page here.

If you have questions about the event or would like to volunteer, please contact Bart Bartels atbbartel@illinois.edu or 217-244-7572. 

Hello Ofelia,

It would be great if you would do some research into the most effective conservation tips, and select the best based on that research.  However, if you do not have time, I would like to see these three: turn your computers off at night, consolidate coffee makers and mini-fridges, and as always turn off the lights.

Thanks,

Morgan

-----Original Message-----

From: Ofelia Rodriguez

Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2014 5:33 PM

To: Johnston, Morgan B

Subject: Illini Energy Website

Hello Morgan,

I am working on the Illini Energy website and am in charge of having energy saving tips. I wanted to ask for your opinion on what type of information would be useful or would be best to have on the website. We have a long list of energy saving tips, but wanted to focus on top 3 tips to put not the website.

Look forward to hearing from you!

Best,

Ofelia Rodriguez

Collin has been involved in this project from the very beginning, so he should be involved in any further discussions on this project. I really want to ensure proper code compliance on this since it was not originally built nor inspected to verify adherence to the International Residential Code or the NEC. We are trying to renovate it to be considered to be a code-compliant single family residence. - Craig Grant

ECO OLYMPICS
University of Illinois
Energy Conservation Competition
Think Globally....Act Locally!

ECO-OLYMPICS is an energy competition between 20+ residence halls on campus. 

Our goal is to engage, educate, and motivate students/employees/professors to change their behavior, and have a good time while doing it.

Eco-Olympics is part of a nationwide program called Campus Conservation Nationals 2014, as well as a mini Big Ten competition FMI: www.competetoreduce.org/ccn.  Trophies and prizes will be given to the successful halls.

What you can do to help:

• We need Building captains to organize a team of students to educate, promote, market, and motivate their residence hall.
• Each team will post flyers, hold meetings and create their own winning strategy designed to gain participation throughout the competition and save electricity.
• Register and put your team together (all team members need to register )
• Compete for coveted trophy and prizes 
• Make a difference in the world creating behavioral change for a better future.

You and your team members play a critical role in this incredible opportunity to make a difference in campus energy usage. 

This is the inaugural competition, so we will be creating a yearly tradition to leave behind and impact future students here at UIUC. The participants will also be able to include this on their resume as leadership, volunteering, team building and/or group participation. 

There will be meetings in March leading up to the competition that is scheduled for March 30-April 22, these meetings will train participants, go over the guidelines, and assign buildings to each team.

Thank you for your interest and participation in Eco Olympics, a Great opportunity making a difference locally and globally.

If you have any question I can be reached at gfoote2@illinois.edu

Competition Director

Paul Foote

In March 2014, F&S applied for funding from ICECF to support additional T12-T8 lighting retrofits.  The amount requested is $88,127.00.

• Structure
  
  • 10 students, 6 faculty, 6 staff
  • $1.1 million to distribute among student and faculty projects
    • Cleaner Energy Technologies fee
    • Sustainable Campus Environment fee
  • 4 Subcommittees
    • Executive
    •  Bylaws
    • Fines
    • Marketing
  • 6 topics – include more community input
    • Land
    • Energy
    • Food and waste
    • Education
    • Water
    • Transportation
• Strategic Impact
  
  • ICAP concerns  - fund projects that help UIUC reach ICAP goals
  • Projects that have no other method of funding.
• Process
  
  • Step 1: ideas get turned into specific requests and goals, submitted to SSC in application with project abstract and approximate funding needed.
  • Applications are reviewed and selected based on strategic impact goals, get invited to step 2…
  • Step 2: Specific logistics figured out, feasibility reports made
  • Step 3: Entire SSC votes
• SSC allocations
• Future goals
  
  • More student engagement
  • Expand outreach efforts
  • Get more student-driven project applications
• Some projects/organizations SSC has funded…
  
  • Green Observer
  • Bike Shop
  • Solar decathlon house

• RSO and YMCA program
• Publish 4x/year
  
  • Next issue comes out Monday, 3/17
  • In print at YMCA, Greg Hall, ACES library, Union, LAR (maybe)
• Mission
  
  • Inform students about environmental news
  • Provide students with platform to practice journalism and practice journalistic advocacy
    • Journalistic advocacy – choosing specific topics to write about, inherently advocating for those issues.
• Mutual Benefit
  
  • Goals to collaborate with other environmental organizations
    • Send press release about upcoming events (email Olivia Harris, oharris2@illinois.edu)
    • Co-sponsor events
    • Calendar function – google calendar with environmental events/talks/presentations

• 6 Project Groups
  
  • Earth Week Committee
    • Organize events for Earth week
    • Includes speakers, panels, movies, benefit concert
  • Education Project Group
    • Develop environmental curriculum to teach 4th and 5th graders
  • Florida Orchard Prairie (SSC funded)
    • Sustainable landscaping
  • Sustainable Food
    • Introduce ideas about food
    • Work with Student Sustainable Farm
    • Farmer’s Market
    • “group of friends talking about food”
  • Weatherization Committee
    • Design methods to make homes more efficient
    • Distribute packets of information and supplies
  •  Beyond Coal Committee
    • Stop UIUC from investing in “the filthy fifteen” coal companies
    • Design campaigns
• Past events
  
  • Powershift conference – social and educational events
  • Keystone XL rally
  • Sierra Club training
• Meetings
  
  • SECS – Wednesdays at 6:30p in YMCA
  • Beyond Coal – Thursdays at 8:00p in YMCA basement

Energy generation SWATeam 

Intros Ben McCall, Tim Mies, Nate Welch, Stephanie Lage, Drew O'Brien, Ben Beeber, Morgan Johnston, Mike Larson, and Scott Willenbrock (chair).   Scott did house and wants to work on changing campus.    BJM thanks. All busy people and really great that you are willing to participate in this. ISEE is newest incarnation of sustainability on campus. Have ear of administration. Set up personally by wise. Something she cares about. When I took the job in dec, obvious I can't do it alone. Mission is icap. Commitment we made in 2010 to move to climate neutrality by 2050. Very big challenge. Especially in energy generation. Also one on conservation and bldg standards.    Long term vision is to recommend policy changes to campus for how to move forward with sustainability across the campus. Don't have a mechanism in place for taking these recs and funding streams. At vc level soon to be at chancellor level. So starting with evaluate where we are now. This team can evaluate. And identify actions campus could take to meet 2015 goals. We should use the word could for now.    Once mechanism is set up, then can up charge the teams scope. Team can spawn studies Etc to make progress. Core group of six and ultimately surrounded by consultation group to feed in ideas info feedback. Also public input open sessions for whole campus.    Ben remember about ten hours per week. Org mtgs. Background research. Gather and synthesize info. Also faculty chair of group. BJM here to kick you off and let you go. Mostly won't need him cause he doesn't know enough to be an active participant to the group.    Specific deliverable. Short report or white paper before April 21. Discussions that week about campus sustainability. Prefer to have his talk vetted by a group of people. Also could have public discussions that week.    Larger role of SWATeams. Vision of iSEE will be essentially permanent teams. Annually reevaluate progress. Every five years review targets. Ongoing effort for campus. Really here at the beginning.    Scott. Trying to get mechanical engineering prof to join us.    Ben please set doodle for next week and then three weeks for now. That to be regular meeting time. Not going to meet spring break. Four working weeks to produce this report.   Verbatim from icap targets and strategies. Comments non judgemental. Just statements of fact. Here's where we are at. Just factual. Not criticism or applause just fact.    Solar farm. Sentence about timeline should be removed. Solar farm speculating about what's going to happen in the future is not really in our purview. Mike says, The project is in progress with a completion date not yet certain. Nate says this is significant land use. My group is interested in app. Sequestration infrastructure. Going to need a big pond. Rice production and similarities between that and algae. Co2 bubbling sequestration in ground. Have bubble size from a four year old study. From a large perspective there's a 20 acre demand in motion. So that's a feasible technology for rooftop and parking decks etc. Scott you are talking about stage two discussion. That's a later discussion. Are we accurately describing the campus.    By fy15 means what? Start or end. Generation by fy15. During fy15, 5% electricity from renewables. Compared to fy08 during that. If no further action what is destined to happen. Fy 14 is almost done.    So assessing where we are now and using that to see what could be done in fy15.   Drew. Talking about renewable energy certificates. Do recs count for the five percent? BJM. My understanding if you were to buy green power from wind farm. Buy recs separately from electrons. Would count per BJM.    UI is pre buying power through hedge program. Reverse auction in April for fy 15-17. Mike 15-25% pricing info and deciding ahead of time. Buying electrons and recs together. Spirit of docs is offsets should be last resort. Do what we can to reduce emissions themselves. And use offsets to meet targets. Recs are dirt cheap right now. drew sticky issue. What percentage would that bring us to? About 2%.    Tim solar projects decathlon houses? Feed into campus. I hotel. Solar charging batteries etc. All over the place. Ask Morgan for arrays on campus. Ask why it doesn't include solar decathlon houses? Two now another in progress. Tim will find out status of one at energy farm. Connected to Ameren. Paid by campus. Mike I hotel. Tim AG.    BJM 4. Cease all investment to increase the lifetime. Abott is doing maintenance and repairs to be able to use the assets. Scott AEI report in progress. BJM showed Scott a prelim draft. ICAP asked for the report to be done by 2012.  Mike can provide the exact dates. Has been going on over a year. He will give the PO info.    KCPA array. Size? Study impact. Want this to have an upside to it. Maybe slower than icap wanted. Should acknowledge the efforts being made. Nate to understand what's in motion currently. Mike can outline what we have tried. Study of biomass available in area. Test burn of wood hips. Tried to figure out how to burn Miscanthus. Have design for a biomass feed. Have coal stoker boilers. Set up for rocks. Try to put in leafy materials. Have a conceptual design. Have gone down a lot of paths none of which have been successful.   

Energy conservation SWATeam

Intros. Ben McCall, Darah Patel (USGBC), Josh Whitson, Karl Helmink, Stephanie Lage, Morgan Johnston, Claudia Szczepaniak (clerk), Claire Mcdonal, Brian Deal, Scott Willenbrock. Overlap with this group to attend as many as possible. Tight linkage between these two groups.    Brian. Sedac, icap core writer from 2010.   Ben: Thanks for coming. About iSEE. New on campus being treated equally to other institutes like Beckman and igb. Three missions. Educ and outreach and campus sustainability. Not possible to make such progress on sustainability on our campus. Or a lot if progress has been made. It wouldn't be possible for me to make a difference by myself. So formed teams.    I was told My job is to figure out how to implement the icap. SWATeams long lasting constantly reevaluating our progress strategies and goals. Long term version. To get there still need mechanisms for how to handle these recs. who would decide what is acceptable. Don't have that answered yet. Who will they answer to and who will they make recs to? Given that we don't have that framework we are kicking off this initial phase. To evaluate where the campus is and to identify what steps the campus could take. Not a should terminology at this time.    Brian. So the former executive council? Still valid? How to put something like that back together? Who is responsible for the implementation? F&S, iSEE, VCR, housing. Not yet decided.    Brian ISEE sits under VCR now right? Yes.  Working to identify the other faculty member. Six people are the core group of the SWATeam. Larger consultation team to provide input data and feedback. And future public input discussions for general campus community. Specific charge now is a short report summary of how we are doing wrt 2015 targets and goals. And actions to consider to help meet those goals.    In this team, good news story. Already exceeded the goals for conservation. May be other aspects of the strategies to consider etc. Brian says "Shut down the coal assets, Scott."   Claudia is getting class credit about ten hours per week. Clerks. Minutes. Logistics background research. Analysis. Etc. Faculty as the chair. Brian will be the chair. He asks if we still want to be part of it?   Brian says defer to josh and Karl. Karl says Kent had a Energy report from fy14.  Fy13 plus July.    The AEI master plan has three scenarios. Constant, historical growth rate and a doubling of the growth rate. Are you kidding me? What about this scenario? It isn't flat or growing. Per square foot. Do aft grow? In the icap we said you can't grow. Parallel discussion going on about formalizing the policy of space growth. Net zero by design. Well it may be even stronger than that. So much wasted space. Don't have space. Lincoln hall and natural history bldg went down at the same time. The idea was to set up a way to manage that.    These are the bigger picture questions about how to move forward in the long hall. For now evaluate how we have done for energy conservation and building standards. Josh can walk us through it. Rcx started July 07.  Not huge conservation efforts prior to that. Fy09 is when epc started. You can see how the BTU per sqft went down. Independent of petascale. Good news. Making good progress. Not weather normalized. Why up in fy13? Hot summer and lincoln hall.    In discussion about utility overall campus plan. Notice some small amounts of regression and not going backwards significantly. Improvements not maintained at the level they were. What about going back to the same buildings. Law of dimishing returns apply. Some bldgs are still hitting higher groups. Preventive maintenance to maintain the savings.    BJM recs to team to review the targets and strategies that are listed in the icap. Good to go through these and determine what happened. Per sq ft and actual. Implement decentralized energy billing. Charge colleges for energy use. Instead we have ECIP. Examine the items and what could be done.    Discussion of EUI vs total energy. Existing buildings. Uirp. Brian Don't have control over what they do. Have no say on what they do and what they build. Uirp pays for their energy. Same with auxiliaries operational control. Research stations. Allerton not operational control. Contiguous control. Operations at allerton are different. Pay their own bills. Outside operational control. Energy is not part of it.    It would be helpful for this team to clarify that point. How do we decide what counts? Dixon springs. Data from U&ES match that to the square footage. Don't count airport.    Define the scope. To compare. Need to set clear criteria to apply for whether something is under our operational control. Scott asked why include petascale. Carbon neutral petascale next time. The point is the cost of doing business. It should be built into the cost of it. Providing the power should be part of their internal costs. This is giant. Can't ignore it.    Need to identify the operational control. Contiguous doesn't make that much sense to me. Looking through EUI and sq ft etc is needed. Between now and when the group meets again, what should folks do? Become familiar with what we said in 2010.  Review it and bring questions.    Next meeting Friday is good.