Indiana University Bloomington
AC-8: Campus as a Living Laboratory

An intern at the IU Office of Sustainability (IUOS) completes the greenhouse gas inventory, which allows us to examine our progress towards reducing our emissions and helps identify areas to address.

An IUOS intern works to help certify IU buildings through LEED and make better resources available. Some outcomes include:
1) Acted as liason between camps and third part consultants 2) Creation of a database for common resources need for LEED certification 3) Addition of documents to the database.

A class in the Geography department focused on food systems uses food purchasing information from the institution to work with the Real Food Challenge calculator. Interns through the Office of Sustainability also work to maintain the campus garden and improve the sustainability of food purchases on campus. This internship lead to the annual Big Red Eats Green festival, a guide to sustainable eating, numerous Food Summits (which bring together students and food vendors to discuss sustainable food options), and changes in the language for food and beverage contract bids.

Several internships through IUOS have created noticeable energy benefits. The largest and most frequent of which is the IU Energy Challenge, which is run twice annually by interns and a network of building liaisons, and encourages residence hall and academic and administrative building occupants to work together to reduce energy use. This engages RAs in residence halls, eco-reps in residence halls, the Residence Hall Association, Greek houses and their Sustainability Chairs, as well as numerous other groups and individuals on campus. In Spring 2015, a math class also used campus energy data in order to evaluate trends and to create models and predictions related to weather changes and campus energy use.

In the past several years, student interns have mapped potential rain garden locations - even building two of them with the help of volunteers, have organized volunteer clean-up days for woodland areas on campus, and have been compiling a tree inventory to assist with tree management. The GIS tree inventory is creating data that can be used by multiple classes across campus to calculate the ecosystem services delivered by campus trees. It is also become a component of several IU classes.

The Green Purchasing internship through IUOS has reviewed practices from other institutions, collected baseline data, analyzed purchasing of office paper and cleaning supplies, and assisted in the creation of a Green Cleaning Policy.

The Bicycle Friendly Campus Initiatives internship has since 2010:
1) Created the Bicycle Steering committee 2) Identified future partnerships and future projects 4) Began mountain bike rental with IU Outdoor Adventures 5) Began research on a bike share program 6) Created IUBikes Twitter account and facebook page 7) Began IU Students for Bikes student group 8) Began working on a bike map app, and 8) created and posted 30 signs about bicycle safety.

Students have used waste audits as a way to engage with and learn about the campus waste system. Students have chosen to conduct waste audits in public areas, such as the lobby of Ballentine Hall (one of the largest academic buildings on campus) with a sign reading "Waste audit in Progress" and information available for curious passerbys.

The Utilities Conservation program internship also contributed to the Energy Challenge, resulting in reduction of water used in both academic buildings and residence halls. Student interns also worked with landscape division to identify potential rain garden locations, and planted two so far with the help of a number of student volunteers.

Students are involved in all aspects of sustainability at Indiana University. The Campus Sustainability Advisory Board has a number of student representatives, who often are working with a large, broad advisory body for the first time. Most of the seven sustainability Working Groups, although mostly comprised of faculty and staff, are organized and run by student interns. Students also participate in Green Teams, and in newer initiatives related to "statewide sustainability" - the effort to bring people together and begin collaborative conversations around sustainability at all of the IU systems' regional campuses as well.

The Hoosier to Hoosier (H2H) Community Sale is a reuse program that aims 1) to divert reusable items from the landfill during student move-out, 2) to prevent additional resource consumption by selling collected items to students and community members in order 3) to raise funds for local charities and other organizations.

The 2015 Hoosier to Hoosier sale is a partnership between the City of Bloomington, Cutters Soccer Club, and the Indiana University Office of Sustainability.

Since its inception in 2010, the Hoosier to Hoosier Community Sale has diverted 172 tons of material from the landfill and to the community, and has raised more than $100,000 for local organizations.

An interdisciplinary collaborative of IU faculty is working in partnership with the university architect's office and the City of Bloomington to restore the Jordan River, which is key ecological and aesthetic feature of the campus. Some of the research involves studying flow rates, nutrient loads (Phosphorous, Nitrogen, etc), the non-market value of the river, perceptions of the river by the IU community and desired future conditions of the river, as well as a landscape history of the university. All of these projects involve undergraduates and graduate students.