March 2024

During SDG Action and Awareness Week (March 4-8), more than 30 events featuring dozens of speakers offered opportunities for students, faculty, staff, and members of the local business and non-profit communities to share about sustainability research and initiatives and connect with colleagues. Along with our organizing partners, the Office of Sustainability offers sincere appreciation to everyone who attended, coordinated events, and presented. 

The proceedings were recorded, and videos will begin to be uploaded to the Brooks Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) YouTube channel in the coming weeks.

Each year, communities worldwide observe Earth Day on April 22. The Office of Sustainability extends the celebration throughout the month of April for Earth Month. 

The Georgia Tech community is invited to host and attend events throughout the month and to join us on April 17 for the Earth Day Sustainable Org Fair and Celebration from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the Kendeda Living Building Patio.  

The Georgia Tech Climate Action Plan will be published this month. Follow us here, on social media, and via the Daily Digest for updates.

Want to get involved with implementation? Email us at sustain@gatech.edu. 

The Office of Sustainability wishes to recognize individuals taking action to advance sustainability across the full spectrum of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) on campus. Fill out the form below to nominate a Champion! 

Enjoy tabling from sustainability-related student organizations and campus departments, Earth Day design screen printing (BYO t-shirt or other item), and free King of Pops! Want to table? Sign up here. 

Partake in an internationally recognized workshop that uses information from IPCC reports to teach the causes and effects of climate change through an engaging, collaborative game. Sign up here.

A new paper authored by Georgia Tech faculty and students published in Nature Scientific Reports utilized Georgia Tech fleet data from Fleet Management and the police department to model the carbon and financial payback of switching to electric vehicles for a university campus.  

The study showed that the carbon payback, otherwise known as the period of time in which carbon savings from lower-emission operations exceed the initial carbon emitted during manufacturing, for replacing Georgia Tech's top 20 most emitting vehicles with electric vehicles was only four months. The authors also report lifetime savings of $342,324 from reduced fuel and maintenance costs. 

The paper, "A multi-scale lifecycle and technoeconomic framework for higher education fleet electrification," started as a project by the student organization ElectrifyGT and was continued by the Social Equity and Environmental Engineering Lab. Authors include Georgia Tech students and ElectrifyGT members Jason Juang, Wyatt Williams, Arjun Ramshankar, John Schmidt, Kendrick Xuan, and School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (courtesy appointed in the School of Public Policy) Assistant Professor Joe Bozeman III.

The findings align with Georgia Tech's goal to reach 100% clean ground transportation by 2030. The use of fleet data in the study provided by Infrastructure and Sustainability (I&S) is a success story for the Living Campus Initiative, which supplies campus operational data to researchers in order to harness Georgia Tech's campus as a testbed for innovative solutions.

Following Georgia Tech's SDG Action & Awareness Week and Kennesaw State's Equinox Week, the Higher Education Learning Community (HELC) of the Greater Atlanta UN Regional Center of Expertise developed the Atlanta Declaration on SDG Education and Research with input from students, faculty, and staff.  The HELC asks for signatures in support of the Declaration's goal of advancing sustainable development education, research, operations, and partnerships across Atlanta. 

Georgia Tech faculty contributed to the Georgia Environmental Protection Division's (EPD) Preliminary Voluntary Emissions Reduction Plan, published March 8. Many of the state's solutions, which range from electrifying the transportation sector to increasing renewable energy and energy efficiency, align with Georgia Tech's Climate Action Plan, which will be released this month.    

A new lunch option is being offered in the Kendeda Building from 10:45 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. each Thursday. Food is available for purchase from a local vendor who serves authentic Japanese cuisine with a focus on healthy and sustainable ingredients. Stay tuned for more sustainable food vendors in the future!