Read about the 2013 Sustainability Innovation in Research and Education (SIRE) projects focusing on measuring sustainability on campus.
- Fix your stuff! Consumption and waste by UW-Madison students
- Relating Food Values to Objective Sustainability Metrics: A campus dining case study
- Developing sustainability metrics for greenhouse, aquaponics systems, and rooftop gardens on the UW campus
- Water, sustainability, and green infrastructure
- Sustainability in and out of the classroom: Integrating teaching with research on sustainability
- Carbon positive approaches to integrating campus with nature
- WI Make Sustainability
Fix your stuff! Consumption and waste by UW-Madison students
PIs: Carol Barford, Nancy Wong, and Ruth Olson
In order to prepare students to be responsible stewards of cultural, financial and environmental resources, we need basic understanding of acquisition and disposal behavior in the Millennial age group (persons born during the 1980’s and 90’s). The proposed project will create a cultural model for students at UW-Madison using a combination of interviews and archival research. The model will differentiate between students from the Midwest and from the East and West Coasts, and also between the current generation of UW-Madison students and earlier ones. Information from this qualitative work will be compared with data from “trash audits” at multiple dormitories on campus. The project will also calculate the carbon and dollar costs for the life cycle of key consumer goods. Together, these qualitative and quantitative results will culminate in creation of a survey instrument that can be used in the near future to measure responsible consumption by UW students, and to contribute to campus sustainability metrics such as STARS.
Project Team:
Carol Barford, Ph.D.
Director
Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE)
Professor Nancy Wong
Professor, School of Human Ecology
Ruth Olson, Ph. D.
Associate Director
Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures
Relating Food Values to Objective Sustainability Metrics: A campus dining case study
PIs: Jed Colquhoun and Erin Silva
Food sustainability is complex and heavily burdened with economic, social and environmental tradeoffs. As a result, there often exists a major divide between what food service consumers say they will purchase and what is on their tray when they check out. This project will prioritize food sustainability parameters (such as local, family-owned farms, organic, etc.) among campus dining customers, refine metrics that can communicate food sustainability around the prioritized customer values, and inform customers about the food that they consume. In a case study, leafy greens will be provided in campus dining from multiple sources, sustainability metrics for each source will be communicated to the customer, and sales volume will be tracked in a way that will allow for comparison among sources and associated sustainability parameters. This project will provide a campus foundation for sourcing food that relates to customer sustainability values in a way that is economically solvent for dining services as well as refine relevant sustainability metrics that will allow students to make informed food-related decisions during their time on campus and beyond.
Project Team:
Jed Colquhoun
Professor, Department of Horticulture
Erin Silva
Associate Scientist, Department of Agronomy
Jeffrey C. Orr
Executive Chef
Dining & Culinary Services
Developing sustainability metrics for greenhouse, aquaponics systems, and rooftop gardens on the UW campus
PI: Erin Silva
Interest in campus food production is expanding at universities across the United States. Campuses are taking several approaches to address this interest, including local production on student-run farms and rooftop gardens. However, there is a lack of metrics with respect to the production capacity and environmental impacts of these endeavors. We propose to collect data regarding the current and potential capacity on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to produce food for the campus dining services, focusing on the production of leafy greens. To do this, we will address the following objectives: 1) Conduct yield trials of leafy greens produced on different growing media on three sites on campus (Union South, Pyle Center, and New 32 Residence Hall GreenHouse; 2) Measure water quality and quantity of roof top leafy green production using various soil and soilless media; and 3) Refine simple, relevant and meaningful metrics that address the production of leafy greens on and in campus roof top gardens and greenhouses, and other on-campus production opportunities. Cost-of-production, yield, food miles, energy inputs (heating, cooling, lighting, watering, tillage), and storm water effluent and quality data will be included in the generation of the metrics. In addition, we will integrate an educational component through the integration of our activities into the GreenHouse Learning Community through innovative programming and student internships. Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems research briefs, campus communication channels such as the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences weekly electronic news “eCALS”, and appropriate project websites.
Project Team:
Erin Silva
Associate Scientist, Department of Agronomy
Gary Brown
Director
Office of Planning and Landscape Architecture in Facilities Planning and Management.
Wally Graeber
Research Intern
Alan Turnquist
Program Coordinator for Greenhouse Learning Community
Water, sustainability, and green infrastructure
PIs: James LaGro Jr, William Likos, Steven LoHeide II, John Harrington, Christina Remuca, and Matthew Ginder-Vogel
The project focuses on managing precipitation on the UW-Madison campus to reduce the quantity and improve the quality of stormwater runoff. Built environments – including university campuses – are dynamic landscapes, creating opportunities to increase sustainability by the inclusion of green infrastructure during the retrofitting of buildings and other infrastructure. Green infrastructure strategies reduce the “effective imperviousness” of the built environment by disconnecting impervious surfaces, increasing the retention and infiltration of precipitation and runoff, and increasing runoff storage and detention capacity. The project has 2 aims:
1. Conduct a campus-wide assessment of above- and below-ground stormwater management infrastructure by evaluating and mapping the existing strengths, weaknesses, and cost-effective opportunities to implement green infrastructure best practices.
2. Develop a major research grant proposal that will be submitted in 2014 to secure external funding for basic and/or applied science on the structure, function, implementation, and management of urban green infrastructure.
Project Team:
James A. LaGro, Jr
Professor, Urban and Regional Planning, Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
William J. Likos, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Steven P Loheide II, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
John A. Harrington
Professor and Chair,
Landscape Architecture
Christina K. Remucal, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Matthew Ginder-Vogel, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Sustainability in and out of the classroom: Integrating teaching with research on sustainability
PIs: Adrian Treves, Cathy Middlecamp, and Holly Gibbs
Our proposal builds on a prior award from the Office of Sustainability. It brings together three instructors from two colleges and departments in the Biological and Physical Sciences to integrate varied sustainability topics into three undergraduate courses taught across five cross-listed departments and reaching >300 students per year. As colleagues in the Nelson Institute and working in league to promote sustainability, more than ever we now realize how important it is to carry out our work together and as part of a wider community. In this second SIRE round, we aim to continue and deepen our collaboration. The three professors aim to integrate sustainability research more fully into teaching. Each strives to incorporate service alongside learning so the lessons of classroom support real-world efforts to improve the sustainability of environmental systems.
Project Team:
Adrian Treves
Associate Professor
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
Cathy Middlecamp
Associate Professor
Environmental Studies and Integrated Liberal Studies Program
Holly Gibbs
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
Carbon positive approaches to integrating campus with nature
PIs: John Harrington, Gregory Nemet, and James LaGro Jr
Greater than half of the global population inhabits cities, consuming only 2% of the land mass, but contributing 75% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, inspiring the Clinton Foundation to create the Climate Positive Development Program (CPD Program). The CPD Program creates neighborhood-scale developments to meet urban population demands while achieving net-zero (or better) GHG emissions – in an economically viable manner. These projects create places that are not just buildings, roads and sidewalks, but systems that produce energy, distribute electricity, heat and cool places, process waste, provide water and lighting, and access transportation.
The CPD program requires the extraordinary environmental performance standard of 100% reduction of operational GHG emissions for campus scale multi-building pilot projects. The proposed research will utilize UW-Madison campus metrics to develop a base case and optimized scenarios to determine the type of strategies needed to realize the CDP Program standard. By using the software tool that optimizes the key indicators of Operational Carbon (mtonCO2e/yr); Energy Use (MWh/yr); Potable Water Use (ML/yr); Waste Landfilled (mton/yr); Passenger Km Travelled (PKT/day), each of the CPD program pilot projects demonstrate how net-zero operational GHG emissions level can be reached. The results of this research effort utilizing the software tool provided by the Clinton Foundation and focusing on UW-Madison campus operations will identify strategies that could be shared with campus decision makers as they consider creating low carbon campuses.
Project Team:
John A. Harrington
Professor and Chair,
Landscape Architecture
Gregory F. Nemet
Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and Environmental Studies
Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment
James A. LaGro, Jr
Professor, Urban and Regional Planning, Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
Christine Scott Thomson
WI Make Sustainability
PIs: Erica Halverson, Giri Venkataramanan, and Duncan Carlsmith
The goal of our project is to launch WI Make Sustainability, a maker movement with a focus on sustainability research and education. The maker movement is an emergent model for fostering rapid innovation in a makerspace where individuals with diverse formal and informal skills come together with a purposeful goal of a making an artifact. The researchers believe that this is an ideal model for breaking the perceived glass walls in the academia and innovating solutions to improve sustainability. To reach the goal of this project, the researchers plan to:
1. Collaborate with UW-Madison Facilities Planning and Management to create a makerspace for sustainability by remodeling an existing campus facility;
2. Develop and offer a WI Make sustainability, an interdisciplinary course sequence that focuses on conception, design and building, and support of sustainable habitats and practices;
3. Develop scholarship in the areas of sustainability metrics for learning spaces, research on sustainable habitats, making as a forum for interdisciplinary research in sustainability, and the pedagogy of making and its role in interdisciplinary education in sustainability.
Project Team:
Erica Halverson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Giri Venkataramanan
Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Duncan Carlsmith
Professor, Physics Department
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