sustainability

U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill will participate in a roundtable discussion with Washington University in St. Louis administrators and energy researchers, and the region’s energy leaders on the nation’s urgent energy needs. The roundtable energy discussion will be held at noon Monday, Jan. 9, at Washington University’s Brauer Hall, Room 3015, followed by a tour of WUSTL’s Ultrafast Laser Facility. 

WUSTL community members interested in topics of sustainability can sign up for the Office of Sustainability’s weekly email newsletter, “Sustainability @ WUSTL”, by following the link on the right-hand side of the page at sustain.wustl.edu. The e-newsletter serves as a compilation of sustainability-related news, updates, events and jobs on-campus and in the region.

Phil Valko, a WUSTL alumnus, has been named director of sustainability at Washington University in St. Louis, announced Steven P. Hoffner, associate vice chancellor for operations. The director of sustainability is responsible for providing leadership, vision and strategy to advance WUSTL’s sustainability efforts.

Washington University in St. Louis has earned a silver rating in the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) inaugural Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS) program. STARS is one of the first tools to attempt to holistically measure sustainability efforts on college campuses.

To kick off a new Styrofoam recycling program at the School of Medicine this month, members of about 15 labs in the Department of Molecular Microbiology loaded one-year’s worth of Styrofoam into a 52-foot 18-wheeler truck April 28. Employees spent one hour loading the Styrofoam into the truck, which was filled about halfway.

Both the Danforth and Medical campuses at WUSTL held many events to celebrate the week of Earth Day April 18-23. At the Medical Campus, Courtney Pike and Liz Wright talk to Changguo Tang, PhD, about gardening and water conservation in front of the BJC Institute of Health at Washington University School of Medicine April 20.

Students living in residence halls on the South 40 and fraternities are turning off lights, unplugging microwaves and printing fewer pages to win the WUSTL Green Cup. The Green Cup contest, which lasts four weeks and ends April 22, recognizes both the residential college and fraternity that reduces its energy use by the highest percentage.

Proposals ranging from sharing electricity savings with lab users to allowing students to bid on how much electricity they can save are among the ideas that students suggested in the Olin Sustainability Case Competition. The winner gets $5,000 cash and a meeting to present her proposal to the chancellor and other top administrators.

WUSTL’s top 11 percent finish in last year’s RecycleMania competition was impressive, but the Office of Sustainability is challenging WUSTL to finish even higher in the 2011 RecycleMania contest, which lasts eight weeks and ends Saturday, April 2. RecycleMania 2011 pits WUSTL against other colleges and universities to see which campus can keep the greatest amount of waste materials from landfills.

Try to imagine an environmentally friendly science lab that reduces, reuses and recycles. That’s the challenge posed by the second annual Olin Sustainability Case Competition at Washington University in St. Louis. Students who devise the best plan for green labs will be seeing green — a $5,000 first prize — when the winners are announced in February.