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

Several projects in our Sustain IU internship program use campus as a lab, where students used applied behavioral science to encourage sustainable behavior. Our first year experience intern collaborates on our energy challenge competition and encourages the inclusion of sustainability in our freshman and graduate student orientation events. We also have an intern that focuses on communications, using Facebook, Instagram and our website to communicate sustainability to the campus community. Finally, we have an engagement intern that has been focused recently on green events. Through hard work with student government, graduate student government and the Resident Housing Association, several organizations across campus are writing policy that makes all their events mandatory green events.

The Hoosier to Hoosier (H2H) Community Sale, supported by the H2H intern, 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 during move-in in order 3) to raise funds for local charities and other organizations. The latest sale functioned as a partnership between the City of Bloomington, Cutters Soccer Club, and the Indiana University Office of Sustainability. The annual event has diverted nearly 300 tons of material from the landfill and to the community since its 2010 inception. More than $250,000 has been raised for local organizations as well.

Our undergraduate research program in sustainability (Sustainability Scholars), class groups, as well as our engagement, communications and marketing, and campus farm interns have also worked with the wider campus and Bloomington community. An example would be our food working group intern and campus farm intern bringing a local food coop and sustainable farm--Bloomingfoods and Fischer farms--to campus for our sustainable food festival called Big Red Eats Green.

Sustain IU Interns, such as the Energy and the Built Environment, Environmental Quality and Land Use, and Transportation intern, are engaged in work related to greenhouse gas emissions, facility operations, tree inventories, and carbon footprint segments related to the university. A project involving on-campus algae based carbon capture is also found on the IU campus. The process captures emissions from the Central Heating Plant and the dried algae product is converted into campus fertilizer.
https://uknow.uky.edu/research/uk-caer-iu-bloomington-launch-sustainable-collaboration

An IUOS intern works to help certify IU buildings through LEED and make better resources available. Some outcomes include:
1) Created a database for common resource needs for LEED certification 2) Published documents to IU's website and disseminated information about green building features of certified projects 3) Facilitated an internal review of IU's LEED Gold policy for all new major construction; this work is ongoing.

The Energy and Built Environment intern works with the Energy and the Built Environment Working Group, IU’s director of energy management and utilities and the university director of sustainability to assist in strategic planning and to assist with tracking IUB's progress toward its energy goals as called for in the Bicentennial Strategic Plan and Integrated Energy Master Plan. Work includes research of renewable energy options, evaluating data related to energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and utility costs - much of this using EnergyCap. This intern also assists in managing the Working Group, including facilitating meetings, assisting with new member recruitment and retention, providing research support, and supporting programming and implementation.

Several internships through IUOS have created noticeable energy benefits. The largest and most frequent of which is the IU Energy Challenge, which is a 4-week fall event, coordinated annually by interns and a network of building liaisons; the challenge encourages residence hall, Greek houses, academic buildings, administrative building, and athletics facilities 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, IU Athletics, as well as numerous other groups and individuals on campus. Integrated Energy Master Plans and energy usage/metering data is also increasingly being viewed and utilized through working groups to inform energy efforts on campus.

One undergraduate Sustainability Scholar is currently mentored by a post-doc fellow in Geography to track IU's Real Food Challenge expenditures and to create a plan for increasing real food purchasing in the future.

The Office of Sustainability employs Campus Garden and Food Working Group interns, who are both working to advance sustainable food options at IU. The IU Campus Farm directly engages students in learning sustainable agriculture and providing food for IU to purchase. The Food intern is continuing the work of previous Food working group interns, developing and collecting metrics for tracking the sustainability of food on the IUB campus, as well as setting goals for educational and operational programming, and implementing initiatives for achieving the goals outlined during the strategic planning process. This includes organization of the annual Big Red Eats Green (BREG) festival, Food Summits, and other initiatives of the Food Working Group that are designed to drive up demand for Real Food on campus.

This past summer, 3 interns working with Sustain IU and with Landscape Services completed the second complete GIS tree inventory for the Bloomington Campus. They are now working to evaluate changes in tree health from 2016 (the first inventory) to 2019, and make recommendations to improve the health and resilience of the campus woodland.
The Sustain IU Land Use and Environmental Quality intern also created GIS layers of the herbicide and pesticide treatment zones on campus. This a first step in increasing the acreage that is managed organically.

The Food working group intern is actively working on a plan to increase the amount of real food purchased on the campus. The work is part of a Provost task force to increase real food purchase. As part of a recently completed Sustainable Materials Management Plan, our resource use and recycling intern is also investigating the predominant single use plastic items and will be working with purchasing to begin reducing the purchase of those items.

IU has employed a Transportation intern since 2010. Accomplishments
include a partnership with the City of Bloomington to move towards a bike-share system, an inventory of bicycle parking, research on university and study abroad travel, and active transportation education at student orientation. A transportation demand survey was deployed in fall 2019 - the results of which are to be used to inform a data backed call to action on various transportation issues on the IU campus.The current intern is designing faculty/staff bike to work and bus to work to encourage the campus community to engage in these forms of commute. The intern is also working on a plan to green the IU fleet and exploring pay-as-you-park systems that might incentivize alternative transportation to and from campus.

The Resource Use and Recycling(RUR) intern and a summer intern along with a campus class's students working on Hoosier to Hoosier sale efforts are engaged with work on waste at IU. The RUR intern is working with audits as a way to investigate and follow up with campus planning. A large-scale waste characterization study was conducted this year and a Sustainable Materials Management Plan was produced. The intern is helping with implementation of the plan in a variety of ways. One key activity is inventorying every recycling bin on the IU campus; this is important to ensure we are following best practices (paired bins) and to understand potential costs of replacement/uniformity.

The Hoosier to Hoosier sale students work to divert the waste from the annual cycle of student move-in/move-out items being left each year. This effort involves student volunteers and is co-led by an intern. Hoosier to Hoosier is a collaboration with Bloomington partners (including the city) to gather and hold a summer sale of recovered items.

The Utilities and Behavior Change intern is contributing to ongoing efforts, including those on the Energy Challenge conservation competition program, which are aimed at the reduction of water used in both academic buildings, administrative buildings, and residence halls. This intern is also working on examining usage data for trends and inconsistencies, developing communication materials on water and energy conservation, and continuing the process of weatherizing utility data to support conservation programming in buildings. Other student interns have also worked with the landscape division to identify potential rain garden locations and other ecological/environmental water management efforts.

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. Our sustainability Working Groups, although mostly comprised of faculty and staff, are organized and run by student interns. Students also participate in newer initiatives related to "statewide sustainability" - the effort to bring people together and begin collaborative conversations around sustainability at all of the IU system's regional campuses.

Many students are engaged in this work across countless units of the university, whether through the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs; advocacy groups like UndocuHoosier; cultural centers including but not limited to LaCasa; campus-wide art and performance series including China Remixed; and student-led speaker series on campus including the annual MLK Breakfast and Day of Service, and environmental justice themed conversations hosted by IU Student Association and the Student Sustainability Council.

The Office of Sustainability employs interns that are increasingly researching sustainable fund development. We currently have an intern that supports our externally funded Indiana Sustainability Development Program. The program has brough in over $700K in external support (from private family foundation and corporate sponsors) and the intern continues to be a part of those efforts.

Healthy IU employs several graduate students who are actively engaged in campus research surrounding active transportation and employee incentives for health programs. Indeed Health IU employees are consistent contributors to our transportation working group and help guide the work of our transportation intern. Various wellbeing and health fairs and public health focused class/research work are also common on campus through respective campus units (IU Health, Healthy IU, EHS, EAP, etc) and schools (IU School of Public Health, IU School of Medicine).