Sustainability at Rensselaer

Awareness Program

• 2008 Campus Wide Energy Audits
• 2008 Utilities Budget Management
• 2008 Eco Hall Challenge
• Live Energy Feedback System

Green Building + LEED certification

• LEED certification
• Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)
• East Campus Athletic Villiage (ECAV)

Renewable Energy

• Energy Procurement Policies
• Using the Sun to Make Ice

Campus Planning and Facilities Design is committed to reducing energy consumption on RPI’s campus. As the campus expands, increasing our potential energy usage, it becomes increasingly more important that efforts are made to conserve energy. We have done this by raising awareness and investing in energy conservation, including renewable energy sources, and new green building construction.

Campus Energy Consumption

• Annual Graphs
• History of Energy Usage on Campus
• The Correlation between Research Grants and Energy Consumption
  

Energy Awareness Program

• 1991 Campus Wide Energy Audits
• 1992 Utilities Budget Management
• Energy Awareness Reminders

Turtle Wings, a Fairfax, VA electronics recycling company, will be sponsoring a free residential electronics recycling day at 2622 7th Avenue Watervliet, NY. The date is May 10th (Saturday) and equipment will be collected from 10 AM to 2 PM. For further information call 518-320-7604.

At Rensselaer our efforts in the past have focused on the reduction of toxic emissions and effluents to the environment by capturing materials prior to discharge by banning drain disposal or using filters for air emissions. This has been a fairly successful approach to minimizing the immediate impact on the environment. However, the resulting waste materials must be carefully handled and eventually either transported to a landfill facility or incinerated. In the next decade EH&S will be emphasizing the need for a more “green chemistry” approach to scientific reserach.

In the spring of 2007, Ecologic and the Residence Hall Association combined their powers to  encourage student energy conservation.   Campus Planning and Facilities Design set up a metering system for all the buildings, to enable members of RHA and Ecologic to monitor the energy usage for each of the residence halls on freshman hill.   This metering system enabled the Eco-Hall Challenge, which is an eight-week competition designed to educate students on life-long habits that reduce energy consumption.  Each of the six residence halls:  Cary, Barton, Bray, Hall, Crockett, and Nason compete with the goal of using the least amount of energy.  The dorm that demonstrated the greatest average reduction in energy use over the course of 8 weeks won an ice cream party and a plaque commemorating their achievements. 

Rensselaer graduates (with dual degrees in mechanical engineering and PDI) Eben Bayer ’07 and Gavin McIntyre ’07 have developed an environmentally friendly organic insulation called Greensulate™. Created from waste agricultural materials, water, and mushrooms, the patent-pending insulation could replace conventional foam insulations, which are expensive to produce and harmful to the environment. The organic insulation is created by pouring a mixture of insulating particles, hydrogen peroxide, starch, and water into a panel enclosure, and injecting it with mushroom cells that digest the starch and produce a tightly meshed network of insulating particles and mycelium. The end result is an organic composite board that has a competitive R-Value—a measurement of resistance to heat flow — and can serve as a firewall. [via School of Engineering]