Carnegie Mellon University
OP-2: Outdoor Air Quality

There are signs posted at some loading dock restricting idling not more than 10 minutes, and building air intake requiring that vehicles or lawn mowers, not idle in the area, or if parked to turn off their engines. We have electrical vehicles in our automobile and maintenance fleet, and we offer charging stations for University employees with chargeable vehicles, we offer shuttle bus service for local travel to campus buildings off campus.

Carnegie Mellon has conducted annual greenhouse gas inventories using the Clean Air Cool Planet calculator for Scope 1 sources and started using Simap in 2017 for University stationary sources. Values shown reflect Carnegie Mellon's share of emissions from the Bellefield Boiler Plant based on our percentage of use and emission values submitted by Bellefield to the EPA. Emergency generators, are only used for testing purposes, and have not been a significant source of air emissions.

Pittsburgh still faces air quality challenges and the work of CMU's Center for Atmospheric Particle Studies (CAPS, https://www.cmu.edu/particulate-matter/about/ ) is directly related to this credit. CAPS drives two programs to assist in understanding how air pollution circulates through the city and neighborhoods and the CMU campus. One program, the Breathemobile, is funded through EPA’s Air Pollution Monitoring for Communities and is one of six such projects in the country. The Breathemobile is packed with scientific instrumentation that provides real-time analysis of local air quality in Allegheny County, the CMU campus, and beyond. They produce insights into how pollution travels from point sources and through neighborhoods. The second program, RAMPs, short for Real-time, Affordable, Multi-Pollutant, gives the region an inexpensive and flexible way to measure EPA monitored pollutants on a wide geographic scale. The effort is funded by the Heinz Endowments. CAPS strives to be a world leader in science, engineering, and policy covering the full role of fine particulate matter in the atmosphere. For more information: https://breatheproject.org/breathe-mobile/ You can also see the application of technology developed by CMU's Robotics Institute CREATE lab, e.g.., an app called "Smell PGH" and a webcam system that allows citizens to visualize air pollution, on the Breathe Project Tech Tools webpages: https://breatheproject.org/tech-tools/#tt-smell-pgh .