Freezer Challenge • OCS Launches LinkedIn • Green Caterers List • Travel Emissions Dashboard • Sustainability Spotlight • Summer Media Recommendations |
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Happy June! OCS was excited to kick off the summer with our first Green Labs Vendor Fair in early June. If you're looking for things to read, watch, or listen to this summer, explore the Media on our Minds: Summer Edition for our recommendations. Check out the rest of the newsletter to learn more about the 2025 Freezer Challenge, JHU’s new travel emissions dashboard, our updated green caterers list, an interview with Dr. Anita Shankar about her work helping to empower female waste pickers, and more. There are many climate, sustainability, and nature-based events this month, so head to our Events page for an extensive list of things to do on campus and across Baltimore.
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Green Labs Vendor Fair Recap
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Thank you to all who joined us for our inaugural Green Labs Vendor Fair! Over 200 attendees visited with 22 organizations who came to share their sustainable lab products and services with JHU faculty, researchers, and students. As a reward for visiting multiple booths, attendees were able to receive a free lunch and a plant cutting in upcycled lab glass, as well as being entered into a raffle for an upcycled bioreactor terrarium.
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Freezer Challenge Runs Through June 30th
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Did you know that ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezers (-70C and below) consume as much electricity as a typical single-family household and that JHU maintains over 1,500 ULT freezers? Join the 2025 Freezer Challenge and learn how to lower your lab’s carbon footprint, improve sample safety, and prolong the life of your freezers by improving your cold storage practices.
In addition to making your lab and JHU more sustainable, the top performing labs from each school/campus can win up to $3,000 in awards to be used for sustainable purchases, upgrades, or repairs. The 2025 Freezer Challenge runs through June 30th – sign up here.
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Save the Date: JH Lab Supply Swap
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The first-ever Johns Hopkins lab supply swap event will be held on July 22, 2025! This is a soft-launch of this event and is open to faculty, staff, fellows and students in: Division of Infectious Diseases, MMI, Clinical Pharmacology, Pathology, Microbiology Labs, Epidemiology and Neurology. More info to come – sign up for the Green Labs Newsletter to receive registration information when it goes live.
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Follow the Office of Climate and Sustainability on LinkedIn |
OCS is now on LinkedIn! Follow us for updates on our work and on sustainability efforts and research across the university.
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| Preferred Green Caterers & Food Trucks List Updated
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Planning an event on campus? Be sure to select a caterer from our list of Preferred Green Caterers, who can provide compostable serviceware at no extra cost for JHU events. The latest version of the list was recently posted and is available on our website.
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“Mathematics for a Better World” Campus Sustainability Course Projects |
During the spring 2025 semester, OCS partnered with Professor Fadil Santosa, who teaches in the Whiting School of Engineering's Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. His course, “Mathematics for a Better World,” encourages students to apply their data and machine learning skills to real-world problems such as food insecurity and the climate crisis.
The students worked with OCS and Carly Hinton at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (BSPH) on several projects that relate to the Climate Action and Sustainability Plan. One team of students used natural language processing to create an inventory of sustainability-related courses offered at Hopkins. Another team created visual representations of JHU waste diversion data, showing where campus waste goes. They also used quadratic regression models to predict BSPH chilled water and steam usage based on temperature.
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Celebrating the Start of Summer |
In addition to last week’s Green Labs Vendor Fair, OCS has started the summer with a bang with Bike to Work Week, a staff volunteer day, and celebrating our graduating interns!
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OCS and JHU's Well-being Program, Live Near Your Work Program, and Transportation Services celebrated Bike to Work Week May 12-16. Staff, faculty, and students were encouraged to join the movement and bike to campus to enhance their personal well-being and reduce the environmental footprint of their commuting. JHU's cyclists were also invited to share selfies and tell us why they love to bike – see what some of them had to say!
From OCS’s Claire Runquist: “I work close enough to my main office location [at Keswick] to walk, but when I need to go to another location—like today, when I had a meeting on the Homewood campus—biking is fast and easy! Plus, I don't have to deal with finding parking. Plus, I love any excuse to be outside. It's great decompression time.”
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OCS staff and the rest of the Johns Hopkins Facilities and Real Estate team headed to The Loading Dock, a building materials reuse non-profit, for JHFRE’s annual Day of Service. Staff sorted through bins of donated materials, moved bricks and tiles, painted doors, and more, all to help The Loading Dock keep building supplies out of landfills and make sure they can get used by people who need them!
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| We also want to congratulate our interns who graduated last month: Atif Akhtar, Simrin Carlsen, Swastik Jha, Katelyn McShine, and Skye Neulight. Best of luck to them in all their future endeavors!
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JHIPH Publishes Year-One Impact Report |
The Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health (JHIPH) recently celebrated its 1-year anniversary! Their Year-One Impact Report: 365 Days Working for Planetary Health at JHU details JHIPH’s efforts towards their mission to bring people together, build community, advance education, inform policy, transform practice, improve clinical care, catalyze research, engage students, connect globally, and collaborate locally.
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The Campus as a Living Lab program supports innovative research and teaching projects that use the campus as a testbed for scalable sustainability solutions.
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JHU Travel Emissions Dashboard Now Live |
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The Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence launched a new Travel Emissions Dashboard communicating the climate emissions impact of business travel across Johns Hopkins University. Supported by our Campus as a Living Lab initiative, the dashboard informs faculty and administrative leaders about the carbon footprint of business travel to allow for better decision-making, encouraging actions such as consolidating travel, choosing more efficient airlines, avoiding stopovers, and opting for lower emission modes of transit, such as rail, where possible.
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The dashboard was produced through a human-centered design process led by organizational change experts from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who hosted participatory workshops engaging more than 100 Johns Hopkins faculty, staff, and student affiliates across seven academic divisions. The project seeks to foster an enabling environment for mitigation efforts that address Scope 3 emissions, which the university's Climate Action & Sustainability Plan seeks to reduce, along with other emissions sources.
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Interview with Dr. Anita Shankar |
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Dr. Anita Shankar is an Associate Scientist in the Department of International Health in the Division of Social and Behavioral Interventions at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the Lead Investigator and Executive Director of the Self-Empowerment and Equity for Change (SEE Change) Initiative – a global training program that empowers women through gender-informed research and evidence-based training services.
One project of SEE Change involves collaboration with the Clean Cities, Blue Oceans program to support women waste pickers in the Philippines and Indonesia through a curriculum based on personal agency and business training.
Read our interview with Dr. Shankar to learn more about her work.
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2025 Summer Reading (and More) List |
Looking for climate and sustainability related media to add to your summer reading list? Check out some of our office’s recommendations for books, podcasts, documentaries, and more to explore, from beach reads to deep dives.
Below are a few highlighted recommendations – head to our site for the full list! In the spirit of sustainability, consider checking out books or movies from your local library, buying secondhand, or borrowing from a friend.
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Our list of things to read, watch, and listen to this summer includes:
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Documentary film We Are Guardians, co-directed by Rob Grabman KSAS ‘11, Chelsea Greene, and Edivan Guajajara, highlights communities in Brazil fighting deforestation and attempting to protect their way of life.
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The BBC’s Planet Earth presents in-depth nature documentaries highlighting different habitats across the globe.
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The podcast How to Save a Planet, hosted by journalist Alex Blumberg, offers “smart, inspiring stories about the mess we're in and how we can get ourselves out of it.”
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In the podcast Open Circuit, produced by Latitude Media, energy industry veterans Jigar Shah, Katherine Hamilton, and Stephen Lacey “explain the forces accelerating the energy transition – from technological leaps and supply chain shifts, to market upheavals and policy breakthroughs.”
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