Princeton’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and conserving resources is more than academic; over the last year the University has continued to create a campus climate that promotes sustainable practices—striving to make green initiatives as natural as wearing orange and black.
Among the most recent projects are:
Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. The newly dedicated center, made possible by a gift from Gerhard Andlinger ’52, aims to preserve the planet through education and research on energy-related environmental issues and sustainable technologies. The center embodies its mission in its physical structure and gardens. The complex features green roofs, rain gardens, advanced lighting controls, heat recovery systems, and rainwater and condensate harvesting.
Bike sharing. The University now has added 70 bicycles available at nine high-traffic locations around campus to provide convenient transportation options for faculty, staff, students, and community members.
The Urban Cultivator. Campus Dining Services, through support from the High Meadows Foundation Sustainability Fund, is exploring growing hydroponic produce through an indoor, fully automated, kitchen garden.
Durable low-carbon cement for sustainable building. Claire White, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, received a National Science Foundation grant to develop new types of cement to lower the roughly five to eight percent of man-made carbon dioxide emissions attributed to current cement production globally.
Sustainable building with bamboo. Lu Lu ’16 and Russell Archer ’16 worked together on their engineering senior thesis project, which focused on the design of a park canopy in Colombia.
Lakeside Graduate Housing. Completed in spring 2015, Lakeside provides housing for more than 700 graduate students in 74 townhouses and 255 apartments. The complex, which is designed to meet the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Silver Certification standards, is heated and cooled by a geothermal system and its landscaped bioswales are designed to remove silt and pollution from surface runoff water.
High-Performance Computing Research Center. The home of TIGRESS—the Terascale Infrastructure for Groundbreaking Research in Engineering and Science Center—is a LEED Gold Certified data center used by many departments and organizations across campus. Data centers can consume large amounts of energy, and their computers tend to generate considerable heat. The center's energy-efficient HVAC system capures that heat and uses it to generate the energy that cools those same computers.
For information on supporting engineering and the environment at Princeton, contact Jane Maggard, associate dean for development, engineering and applied science, at jmaggard@princeton.edu or 609.258.4973 or Tom Roddenbery, associate director, strategic priorities, at thomasr@princeton.edu or 609.258.6122.
