campus sustainability

My Green Lab Initiative Drives Sustainable Practices in Campus Labs

admin — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 22:33:41 +0000

My Green Lab Initiative Drives Sustainable Practices in Campus Labs admin Thu, 04/17/2025 - 18:33

Laboratories are central to Georgia Tech’s mission of driving groundbreaking research, innovative discoveries, and life-saving technology. However, these labs are also significant consumers of resources. With nearly 900,000 square feet of campus lab space, labs use, on average, 10 times the electricity and four times the water of a typical classroom. They also produce most of the hazardous waste on campus. In 2023, Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) brought the issue to the attention of the Office of Sustainability, which led the charge in 2024 to launch a My Green Lab working group and sponsored three campus labs to work toward certification, including the School of Biological Sciences Instructional Labs, the Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience’s Molecular Evolution Core Facility, and the Takayama Lab.

My Green Lab is an international community of scientists dedicated to making laboratories more sustainable and resource-efficient. To achieve My Green Lab certification, each lab conducted an initial assessment to evaluate their current sustainability practices and identified areas of improvement, including waste, water, and electricity. Labs were encouraged to adopt measures such as defrosting and cleaning refrigerator coils, using timers for test equipment, and promoting best practices. Alicia Wood-Jones, Lab and Safety Officer for EH&S, was a key leader in the working group. Known for her work on the Chemical Reclamation Committee, Wood-Jones’ vision and drive are instrumental in finding innovative solutions to long-standing challenges in lab decommissioning.

She thanks her colleagues, including the EH&S Lab and Chemical Safety Team, “for their help and vision. We believe that even small steps forward can make a big difference here at Georgia Tech. I am so appreciative to all involved. I look forward to future collaborations with lab members on campus.”

Katherine Nguyen and her team in the Takayama Lab construct multicellular models and dissect cell signaling pathways to understand disease physiology. While pursuing this research, the lab team activated measures to responsibly manage their lab resources, such as recycling in the lab, keeping centrifuges at room temperature when not needed, and consolidating orders.

“I’m incredibly happy and proud to have been a part of this program and appreciate everyone’s hard work to try to make Georgia Tech a more sustainable campus,” she said. “Our lab was the first academic lab at Georgia Tech to get certified. Sometimes, graduate students want to be greener, but don’t know how to or feel like we have the power to. My Green Lab helped identify feasible options for labs to reduce their waste. Even if labs couldn’t make every single change, any improvement is a positive change.”

Sustainability efforts at the Molecular Evolution Core Laboratory are led by Anton Bryksin, Shweta Biliya, and Adam Fallah. The lab is pioneering Tip-Cycle, a program that sterilizes and recycles pipettes for reuse. This lab also monitors campus blackwater for diseases such as Covid-19, using thousands of pipettes in their work. Faced with resource constraints during the pandemic, these researchers developed innovative solutions to maximize resource efficiency. “We’ve always wanted to make our lab practices more sustainable, but weren’t sure where to start. My Green Lab gave us the tools and guidance to turn that intention into action. This certification represents the dedication of our entire team to create a more sustainable environment,” said Biliya, a Georgia Tech research scientist.

The My Green Lab initiative offers an approach for transforming campus labs into more efficient spaces while producing less hazardous waste. By prioritizing sustainability in our labs, Georgia Tech can have both a global reputation for research and responsible resource management.

Visit the Office of Sustainability for more information on My Green Lab.

Summary sentence

Three Georgia Tech labs are leading the charge in resource efficiency.

Summary

Three Georgia Tech labs are leading the charge in resource efficiency.

Dateline

Thu, 04/17/2025 - 12:00

cathy.brim@gatech.edu

Contact

Cathy Brim
Communications Officer II
Institute Communications / Infrastructure and Sustainability

Drew Cutright
Director of Sustainability Engagement
Office of Sustainability

Associated importer

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My Green Lab

campus sustainability

IS News

tip cycling

office of sustainability

environmental health and safety

Green Buzz

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Campus and Community

Earth and Environment

Georgia Tech Earns STARS Silver Rating for Its Campuswide Contributions to Sustainability

admin — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 17:51:41 +0000

Georgia Tech Earns STARS Silver Rating for Its Campuswide Contributions to Sustainability admin Fri, 01/24/2025 - 12:51

Georgia Tech recently achieved a STARS silver rating by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). STARS stands for Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System and is awarded based upon measured success in five key areas of sustainability in higher education – Academics, Engagement, Operations, Planning and Administration, and Innovation and Leadership. The rating system helps benchmark achievements and identify opportunities where faculty, administrators, staff, and students can be effective change agents.

“The STARS report represents the cumulative work of sustainability performance and leadership across Georgia Tech’s academics, research, engagement, and business operations,” said Anne Rogers, project lead and associate director of Campus Sustainability. “Our silver rating is an important milestone as we continue to demonstrate strategic leadership in sustainability and alignment with the Institute’s strategic plan.”

Sustainability is a common theme throughout the strategic plan, which demonstrates a shared commitment to being thoughtful stewards of our resources – social, environmental, and economic. It is one of many ways Georgia Tech will lead by example in how we deliver on our educational and research mission. STARS will help inform and guide decisions on where to invest resources to achieve our sustainability goals.

Georgia Tech’s recent silver rating is the result of a 22-month effort, led by the Office of Campus Sustainability in partnership with Serve-Learn-Sustain, Facilities Analytics and Communications, and Institute Research Planning, to compile more than 1,300 unique information or data inputs about our sustainability-related actions. More than 150 people were engaged across 100 departments, demonstrating how sustainability is truly interwoven throughout Georgia Tech's operations, research, and educational functions.

Summary of results from the STARS report:

Academics

The Academics category includes both curriculum and research offerings. Georgia Tech scored with 89% of academic departments offering courses in sustainability and 73% of departments conducting research related to sustainability.

Engagement

Engagement includes both campus and public outreach. Georgia Tech has a robust student programming portfolio of sustainability groups and numerous activities centered around gardening, farming, urban agriculture, and wilderness programs. These exist alongside opportunities for students to learn life skills through sustainable employment practices, workshops, conferences, speaker series, and cultural arts events. Staff professional development and training also contributes, with such efforts as the Sustainable Facilities Forum produced each year by Facilities employees. The forum highlights innovative projects and practices Georgia Tech uses to maintain its built environment.

Operations

Measuring sustainability within Operations involves energy usage, food and dining, procurement, commuting modes, fleet, waste, and water. Data in these categories is easily trackable and used regularly by the Institute to make operational decisions. Report data includes the following:

12% reduction in total source energy consumption per unit of floor area from a baseline from fiscal year 2010.

41.44% of total annual food and beverage expenditures are on plant-based foods.
62.43% of expenditures are on cleaning and janitorial products that are third-party certified.
29.75% of materials are diverted from the landfill by recycling, composting, donating, or reselling.
25% of campus fleet vehicles are electric.

Planning and Administration

Sustainability within Planning and Administration includes the categories of access/affordability, investment/finance, and work/well-being. Georgia Tech’s graduation rate for low-income students is 84%. Work/Well-being ratings range from employees receiving a living wage to educational resources related to healthy eating, stress relief, and mental health.

Innovation and Leadership

The Innovation and Leadership categories in which Georgia Tech scores high include sustainability standards such as:

Bicycle-friendly campus status.
Availability of a campus food bank.
Green cleaning practices.
Grounds certification.

“The Institute’s strategic plan clearly outlines that Georgia Tech be a leader in sustainability. STARS is one framework to measure and track continuous improvement, and to motivate us to achieve more,” Rogers added.

The STARS silver rating will help define the future actions and resources needed to achieve even higher ratings in the years to come. The goal is to revisit this rating system every two years. To read the full report, click here.

Summary sentence

Georgia Tech recently achieved a STARS silver rating by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

Summary

Georgia Tech recently achieved a STARS silver rating by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

Dateline

Fri, 07/02/2021 - 12:00

Contact

Anne Rogers
Associate Director
Campus Sustainability

Keywords

stars

campus sustainability

silver rating

strategic plan

Facilities Management

News room topics

Campus and Community

Earth and Environment

Mercury ID

648523

Source updated

Fri, 01/24/2025 - 12:50

The Sustainability Next Task Force Delivers Vision and Launches Implementation

admin — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 01:05:01 +0000

The Sustainability Next Task Force Delivers Vision and Launches Implementation admin Mon, 10/24/2022 - 21:05

This October, Georgia Tech celebrates Campus Sustainability Month by showcasing the new Sustainability Next Plan. Following the completion of Georgia Tech’s strategic plan, the Institute’s executive leadership team formed the Sustainability Next Task Force and charged it with proposing an implementation roadmap for sustainability at Georgia Tech over the next 10 years that emphasizes coordination across the research, education, operations, and economic development activities of the Institute.

For more than 30 years, Georgia Tech has promoted sustainability initiatives ranging from teaching sustainability principles in the classroom, to building one-of-a-kind campus facilities to meet environmental and energy standards, to conducting groundbreaking research. What’s different about the Sustainability Next Plan is that it presents a newly unified vision for coalescing, implementing, and measuring cross-cutting sustainability initiatives at Tech. It will also serve to advance key strategic goals of the strategic plan, including amplify impact, connect globally, and lead by example.

“The plan leverages our diverse and unique strengths to address the most challenging problems of our time,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “It draws a campuswide consensus around well-defined steps that, in addition to moving our campus operations further toward sustainability, will equip students with the skills to recognize and solve sustainability challenges in their careers, and support research that will establish Georgia Tech as a global leader in the development of innovative solutions for a sustainable future.”

Key Priorities of the Institute Sustainability Plan

The Sustainability Next Plan features six key priorities that touch nearly every aspect of the Institute, each with specific objectives and strategies for implementation.

Institute Operations
Education for Sustainable Development
Leading Sustainability Research
Culture and Organization
Climate Solutions
Living Learning Campus

The projects launching in the 2022 – 23 academic year include:

Climate action plan
Living learning campus initiative
Interdisciplinary graduate degree scoping and instructional design
Seed funding programs for cross-disciplinary climate research and teaching with the U.N. Sustainable Development goals
Sustainable-X, a student entrepreneurship program

These projects will be supported by new positions in Infrastructure and Sustainability, the Office of Development, the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, and the Center for Teaching and Learning (in collaboration with Serve-Learn-Sustain). Their shared governance will be strengthened through an Institute sustainability governance project steered by Strategic Consulting.

About Sustainability Next

The Sustainability Next Plan is a mission-critical deliverable of the Sustainability Next Task Force. For more than six months, the task force conducted an exhaustive review of sustainability data gathered from campus programs, units, and partners. The task force also hosted several town halls for students, faculty, and staff and met one-on-one with leaders representing nearly all facets of campus operations to synthesize recommendations that make up the objectives and strategies of the plan. Overall, the process involved engaging with more than 200 key stakeholders and coordinating across all 20 Georgia Tech strategic plan implementation teams, with a particular emphasis on Research Next; Institute Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Anchor Institution; Comprehensive Campus Plan; and International Education.

“The most exciting thing about this plan is that it is so cross-cutting,” said Anne Rogers, associate director of the Office of Campus Sustainability and co-chair of the Sustainability Next Task Force. “Sustainability is inherently collaborative, and we can only achieve our goals when we have buy-in from across campus stakeholders and departments. We’ve had sustainability plans in the past, but never one that matches the scale or scope of this one. We’re excited about what we can accomplish with this new commitment.”

Click here to explore the Sustainability Next Plan, including its objectives and strategies — and visit the site frequently as the plan progresses. For more information, including how you can get involved, contact any of the following Sustainability Next co-chairs:

Maria Cimilluca, vice president for Infrastructure and Sustainability
Anne Rogers, associate director for Office of Campus Sustainability, Infrastructure and Sustainability
Laura Taylor, chair and professor, School of Economics, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
Beril Toktay, professor of operations management, Brady Family Chair, and Regents’ Professor; interim executive director, Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems; and faculty director, Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business, Scheller College of Business

Summary sentence

The Sustainability Next Plan features six key priorities that touch nearly every aspect of the Institute, each with specific objectives and strategies for implementation.

Summary

Following the completion of Georgia Tech’s strategic plan, the Institute’s executive leadership team formed the Sustainability Next Task Force and charged it with proposing an implementation roadmap for sustainability at Georgia Tech over the next 10 years that emphasizes coordination across the research, education, operations, and economic development activities of the Institute.

Dateline

Mon, 10/24/2022 - 12:00

Contact

Jordan Barron
Project Manager
Office of Campus Sustainability

Keywords

cos-climate

cos-community

sustainability next

campus sustainability

go-researchnews

News room topics

Campus and Community

Mercury ID

662496

Source updated

Mon, 10/24/2022 - 18:30

campus sustainability

My Green Lab Initiative Drives Sustainable Practices in Campus Labs

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Georgia Tech Earns STARS Silver Rating for Its Campuswide Contributions to Sustainability

Summary of results from the STARS report:

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The Sustainability Next Task Force Delivers Vision and Launches Implementation

Key Priorities of the Institute Sustainability Plan

About Sustainability Next

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