The Campus RainWorks Challenge is designed to encourage college and university students to design innovative green infrastructure to manage stormwater on campus. Design themes may center around water reuse, pollution management, and runoff reduction. Teams complete their project through the course of a Fall semester, guided by a faculty member.

Project Paplet began in Malaysia as a paper recycling campaign aiming to take once-used paper and turn it into recycled notebooks for children in need. Localizing the project to the University of Illinois, students from the Society of Women Engineers will be collecting used paper from campus departments and producing hundreds of paplets to be donated to the on-campus Child Development Laboratory for use by the pupils.

At the heart of iSEE’s mission is training students to become the next generation of sustainability leaders. To help fulfill this mission, iSEE will develop a “collaboratory” — a new classroom, conference, collaboration, and communications space next to our offices in the National Soybean Research Center (NSRC). This new complex will include space for experiential learning, a collaboration incubator, and a communications laboratory.

INNER VOICES Social Issues Theatre is raising awareness and address issues of Environmental Justice through the creation and production of an original play with accompanying educational materials and holding an inaugural National Call for Scripts focused on the theme Environmental Justice Is Social Justice.

Subsurface (tile) drainage has helped to sustain the productivity of our farm lands by draining excess water from the field. Excess nutrient losses from our tile-drained agricultural fields have contributed to several water quality issues in the region including the formation of hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It has been well-documented that tile drainage is responsible for highly soluble nitrate loss but recent studies have demonstrated that it also contributes to dissolved phosphorus loss from the agricultural fields.

The Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations’ Diversity and Social Justice Education unit (DiversityEd), along with the RSO Students for Environmental Concerns (SECS) and the University YMCA’s Friday Forum Committee, are planning a 10-lecture series themed around sustainability.

This project documented individual trees on campus, using a GPS device and collecting tree details into the ArcGIS data layer.  The previous Tree Inventory was last updated in 2006, and it included trees that had subsequently been removed and it was missing new trees that have been planted. Through this project, the Tree Inventory was updated to include all and only existing trees on campus. The environmental benefits included in the tree inventory are directly derived from iTree, with the help of Davey Research Group who completed the survey on campus. 

Masters of Urban Planning student, Holly Nelson, worked with F&S Transportation Demand Management to create conceptual drawings for each segment of the 2014 Campus Bike Plan.  These files are available as pdf, and posted here.

The 2009 Campus Bike Plan was started as a student project, and completed by Transportation Demand Management Coordinator, Morgan Johnston.  This document was used to prioritize street improvements for bicyclists, and it was a contributing factor in reaching Bicycle Friendly University - bronze level status.