In 2017, Emory honored seven individuals on campus who have played an integral role in helping take Emory’s sustainability initiatives to the next level. The Robert S. Hascall Sustainability Innovator Awards were selected through their affiliation with Emory as an employee, faculty member, student, sustainability representative and alum. Student Innovators Cassidy Schwartz and Olivia Morgan … Continue Reading →
On Monday, June 24th, 70+ medical organizations called the climate crisis “a health emergency” and put out a call for action for government, business, and civil society leaders, elected officials, and candidates for office to recognize climate change as a health emergency and to work across government agencies and with communities and businesses to prioritize … Continue Reading →
This Spring semester, Emory students and staff engaged with the campus and community through events and activities that facilitate conversations and raise awareness about important sustainability-related topics.
The Office of Sustainability Initiatives and Procurement Services at Emory are excited to announce the next step toward the Emory Sustainability Vision goal: “All university events will be zero municipal landfill waste by 2020.”
By: Erica Barton In addition to releasing a report that ranks countries’ progress toward achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) released the 2019 US Cities Sustainable Development Report, which ranks US cities on their progress toward these global goals. The SDGs should be achieved at the national … Continue Reading →
In their next meeting on June 19th, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners is voting on the resolution to phase out “single-use plastics” in all county-owned, -operated and -leased facilities. According to the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, the vast majority of plastics are not recycled, and much of it ends up in our waterways, including the Chattahoochee … Continue Reading →
Emory’s 2025 Sustainability Vision identified four main action arenas, including utilizing Emory’s landscape, buildings, and operations to model best practices. This past year, campus departments made important strides toward realizing Emory’s Sustainability Vision goals
Every year, Emory Recycles and the Office of Sustainability Initiatives hold a competition encouraging recycling efforts around campus. This contest, held throughout November, works to unite the actions of faculty, students and staff in order to demonstrate the largest comparative difference between buildings in recycling from the corresponding month of the previous year.
By Kimber Williams | Emory Report | April 17, 2018 A public ribbon-cutting ceremony is planned for the grand opening of the PATH at Emory, a new bicycle and pedestrian trail that links Emory’s Clairmont Campus to Mason Mill Park and points beyond. The project, developed in partnership between Emory and the PATH Foundation, an … Continue Reading →
The Division of Animal Resources (DAR), headquartered in the Whitehead Biomedical Research Building, made strides in sustainability when they turned to recycling and composting laboratory materials and was recently recognized for its efforts.
Emory students participating in the “Don’t Dump It — Donate It” recycling program as they moved out of residence halls last month turned their used books, clothing, furniture and housewares into support for a local charitable non-profit, re:loom.
Emory Report | Feb. 26, 2018 Emory University has once again received a Gold rating from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) for its leadership and innovation in university sustainability. With this Gold rating, awarded through AASHE’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS), Emory maintains its status since … Continue Reading →
The Emory Farmers Market has been a staple of the community since 2008 when it opened on the campus with its original seven vendors. The market was envisioned as part of Emory’s Sustainable Food Initiative, bringing the Emory community the opportunity to build relationships with farmers and producers who grow and make their food.
Emory University has been recognized by the City of Atlanta for its commitment to energy and water conservation through the 2016-2017 Atlanta Better Buildings Challenge.
From Climate@Emory | July 31, 2018 To help accelerate the smart growth of solar in Georgia, representatives from Emory Law School’s Turner Environmental Law Clinic, Georgia Institute of Technology’s Strategic Energy Institute, and the University of Georgia have published the Georgia Model Solar Zoning Ordinance and accompanying explanatory guide. The ordinance strikes an important balance … Continue Reading →
Emory School of Medicine pediatrics faculty member Dr. Rebecca Pass Philipsborn co-authored a new paper released today that provides evidence that “climate change threatens to reverse the gains in global child health and the reductions in global child mortality made over the past 25 years . . . With implications for all of humanity, climate … Continue Reading →
The 2016 Sustainable Campus Index, a publication of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), highlights top-performing colleges and universities in 17 areas and overall by institution type, as measured by the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS).
A class of Emory College students invites the entire Emory community to come out Friday to learn about sustainable food practices — and sample some tasty treats — at the 12th annual Sustainable Food Fair.
A new technology employed by Emory University to move toward a more efficient and sustainable electrical system has arrived on campus: Cogeneration or Combined Heat and Power (CHP), which will produce one megawatt of clean power for the campus.
Emory University’s sustainability initiatives illustrate the University’s long-standing commitment to sound environmental policies. Built around development of a model for healthy living on campus that translates to communities around the globe, Emory’s initiatives set an example for an ethical approach to creating a healthy and productive place to live, learn and work.
Emory University ranked fifth nationwide in a “Campus Score” to measure the “urbanism, greenness and on-campus living” of 103 research-intensive universities in the US. Emory ranked first for the most greenspace of the campuses surveyed.
As a part of the Sustainability Vision and Strategic Plan, Emory has committed to reducing energy use per square foot by 50 percent by 2025 and total energy use by 25 percent.
By Claire Dakhlia | June 29, 2018 The importance of agriculture is emphasized all over Emory, whether in the Educational Gardens on the Druid Hills campus or at the Oxford Organic Farm on Emory’s Oxford campus. Students, faculty and staff have been involved in these initiatives on campus, but until recently, similar initiatives did not … Continue Reading →
Scientists, researchers and environmental experts from across the state convened at Emory last week to draft the “Georgia Climate Research Roadmap” — a set of targeted research questions that could help Georgia better understand and address one of the century’s defining challenges.
By Leslie King | July 31, 2018 Emory Transportation and Parking Services offers a Commute Alternatives Program (CAP) that saves employees money and links to the state’s Georgia Commute Options program for even more financial incentives to give up driving solo to work. “Whether you carpool, vanpool, take public transit or one of our Emory … Continue Reading →
Emory senior Rebecca Park looked across a sprawling field of shallow plastic trays carpeting a flat, open-air swath of rooftop on the Math and Science Center and saw real estate ripe for rebirth.
During the 2016 fiscal year, Emory successfully diverted 55 percent of waste materials from the landfill. With an almost 5 percent increase from 2015, the University is making progress toward achieving the goal of 95 percent diversion by 2025.
In the summer of 2016, the Office of Sustainability Initiatives (OSI) announced the recipients of its inaugural Green Offices at Emory and Green Labs at Emory Incentives Fund programs, created to encourage students, faculty, and staff to contribute innovative ideas for achieving the goals outlined in Emory’s 2025 Sustainability Vision.
Note: The following content comes from a 2016 Emory Report article, which you can read here. In 2016, after three semesters researching and mapping the university’s sustainability network of over 700 staff, faculty and undergraduate and graduate students, the Graduate Sustainability Group (GSG) has launched an interactive Emory Sustainability Ecosystem map. The map affords … Continue Reading →
Emory Campus Services – Emory Recycles and the Office of Sustainability Initiatives are hosting monthly meetings to answer questions about the University’s new.
When Emory crafted its current Sustainability Vision, one of the University’s most transformative — and ambitious — goals was a commitment to divert 95 percent of campus waste from municipal landfills by 2025, effectively a zero-waste policy.
Plans to develop a new bicycle/pedestrian trail that would link Emory’s Clairmont Campus to Mason Mill Park — and points beyond — are rolling forward, according to the PATH Foundation, an Atlanta nonprofit dedicated to developing public greenway trails.
By Ramsey Baden | July 29, 2018 Discovery is part of the fabric of chemistry at Emory, and Dr. Simon Blakey’s lab pushes for discovery every day. Some of his team’s most innovative practices are rooted in sustainability. In Blakey’s words, his lab practices “sustainability on a molecular level.” Blakey’s lab seeks to create methods that reduce the … Continue Reading →
By Ramsey Baden | August 27th, 2018 The Emory Dance & Movement Studies Program places great value on our relationship with our surroundings. In the words of Director Lori Teague, “the fundamentals of dance are body, energy, space, and time.” It is fitting, then, that Emory Dance’s office is a Gold-certified Green Office. The office takes a number of … Continue Reading →
By Ramsey Baden | August 26, 2018 Emory’s Department of Biology is one of the most active in the country for a reason – there will always be questions waiting to be answered in the life sciences! The Hickman Lab is a biology lab that focuses on fungi: how they reproduce and how they respond … Continue Reading →
By Ramsey Baden | July 22, 2018 On the fourth floor of the Modern Languages Building at Emory, the Institute of Quantitative Theory & Methods has been innovating for six years in the field of data science. The office’s goal is to collaborate with everyone to bring data science skills into every field, from the natural sciences … Continue Reading →
By Ramsey Baden | July 15, 2018 At the Emory School of Medicine, Dr. Shonna McBride and her team of researchers are hard at work learning how the pathogen Clostridium difficile survives in mammalian intestines and spreads to infect others. C. difficile is a pathogen that causes diarrhea, nausea, and fever. According to Dr. McBride, “you definitely want to make sure … Continue Reading →
By Ramsey Baden | August 19, 2018 The Morran Lab is an Emory Biology lab that studies coevolution (which accounts for much of the evolution that occurs in nature) and mating systems (which account for the distribution of genetic variation). To do this, it looks at worms like the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. As a certified Green Lab, … Continue Reading →
By Ramsey Baden | August 12, 2018 The Steinhauer Lab is a microbiology and immunology lab at Emory, and it is on the front lines against influenza. Their study of the structure and functions of the virus HA (hemagglutinin glycoprotein) is directly related to the development of vaccines. Sustainability was already practiced at the Steinhauer Lab when they … Continue Reading →
From Woodruff Health Sciences Center | Jan. 11, 2019 In the United States, there are persistent racial disparities in asthma prevalence, morbidity and mortality. These disparities can largely be explained by looking at socioeconomic and environmental factors, such as access to healthcare, a nationwide analysis shows. The findings highlight the potential of targeted interventions, such … Continue Reading →
The United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS) has officially acknowledged a new regional sustainability network, RCE Greater Atlanta. RCEs are Regional Centres of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development. The designation makes Atlanta one of only six Regional Centres of Expertise in the U.S.
As a nationally recognized leader in scientific education and research, Emory University has hundreds of teaching and research labs throughout its campuses. Beginning in the Summer of 2019, labs will now be included in Emory’s mission towards 95% landfill waste diversion. Launching in the Rollins School of Public Health in May 2019, Emory’s Laboratory Landfill … Continue Reading →
By Ayla Ekici At the end of the academic year, Emory’s thousands of student-residents moved out of the residence halls, requiring them to make choices about what to keep and what to discard and how. Housing, ResLife, Building and Residential Services and the Office of Sustainability once again teamed up for the “Don’t Dump It, … Continue Reading →
From educational gardens to research labs, projects funded by the latest round of grants from Emory’s Office of Sustainability Initiatives (OSI) hope to support pollinators, improve energy use and reduce waste across the University.
By: Erica Barton The 2019 Sustainable Development Report was released last month and ranks 162 countries on their progress toward the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The goals are focused on improving various areas of economic, social, and environmental development in order to create a more sustainable world for all. With Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and France … Continue Reading →
Theater Emory presents several productions each year and with every new program, old scenery materials are replaced by new pieces for current performances. Instead of dumping previous set pieces into a landfill, Theater Emory has found innovative and creative ways to divert about 95% of its waste.
By: Mary Caldwell for the AJC Part of a nurse’s job is to learn about issues that can affect patients’ health, and the importance of climate change has gained increased attention in recent years. With 18 of the 19 warmest years on record occurring since 2001, according to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, … Continue Reading →
More than 40 species of elm are native to the Netherlands, the birthplace of Emory President Claire E. Sterk. As part of Sterk’s formal inauguration program Wednesday, she planted the Ulmus Americana, or American elm, on the Quad.
By Nathan Lindsey | June 20, 2018 On Friday, Jun. 8, I had the privilege of attending the Regional Center for Expertise (RCE) Quarterly Meeting, in downtown Atlanta, at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) office. At the meeting, professionals from higher education (Emory, Georgia Tech, Kennesaw State, Georgia State, Spelman, Agnes Scott, University of … Continue Reading →
For the third year, a group of Emory students coordinated the Emory Sustainability Case Competition, which asks student teams to come up with an innovative and practical solution to a real-world energy issue for the United Nations Regional Centre of Expertise (UN RCE) Greater Atlanta on Education for Sustainable Development and the City of Atlanta.
Nestled in the acreage behind Emory University Orthopaedics and Spine Hospital (EUOSH), this small yet mighty garden provides an amazing bounty of organic, sustainably raised produce used in the preparation of patient meals.
The Office of Sustainability Initiatives (OSI) invited Emory students, faculty and staff to submit a two-minute video that creatively and effectively educated about the importance of landfill waste diversion, including the social and environmental impacts of landfills.
