Virginia Tech
AC-8: Campus as a Living Laboratory

A project that advanced sustainability through Campus Engagement was the work done by the Office of Sustainability interns during the 2022-2023 academic year. The student interns accomplished a host of projects over the course of the year, including: putting forward successful financial proposals to improve the built environment of campus, leading community educational events about water conservation, reducing energy use on campus, and hosting student engagement events throughout the year. This successful program allows students to make a tangible impact on campus by partnering with subject matter experts from both the academic and operational arms of the university. As part of these projects, students are mentored by relevant campus partners and have consistent engagement with university
and community stakeholders.

Student interns continually organize and run events on campus to educate fellow students and get them involved in sustainability. Some examples include: National Recycle Day outside of Squires Student Center, Green Day Tailgating, Green Game cleanups, and Choose to Reuse pop up stands in the dining halls. These informative displays and interactive exhibits encourage students to change their behaviors
and lead more sustainable lives on campus.

The Virginia Tech Perspectives gallery in partnership with the Moss Arts Center is hosting a series of climate justice art exhibits and performance series to advance goal 11 of the university’s Climate Action Commitment. This will feature a range of speakers to engage the campus community, student groups, and larger public in living not just more sustainably but doing so in an equitable way. This art series is
planned to begin in the 2023-2024 academic year and will include indigenous perspectives on climate justice as well as plays, paintings, talks, and films concerning the broader considerations needed to achieve climate justice. Speakers will include scholars and activists such as Winona LaDuke to discuss their experiences with the students and campus community. https://artscenter.vt.edu/exhibitions.html

During the 2023 summer, the art center hosted an exhibit titled “I’ll be your mirror” that examines the relationship between humans and land. Through mixed media art and performances, the campus was encouraged to reflect on sustainability and how one’s relationship to the land impacts the future. The ultimate goal was to create widespread behavior change both on and off campus to have our community work collectively towards a more sustainable and just future.
https://artscenter.vt.edu/exhibitions/ill-be-your-mirror.html

Students have had the opportunity to participate with and to serve with officials from the Town of
Blacksburg and surrounding communities to advance sustainability in our region. Internships with the
Town of Blacksburg government are very common and students work on real world issues.
Recently, the university has broadened its set of considerations to address major social issues in our
community. Dr. Ralph Hall’s food security study has demonstrated a clear need for supplementary food
programs both on campus and in the surrounding community, which has led to key partnerships with
local agricultural producers to encourage local, healthy food distribution. Additionally, the graduate
students, led by Alice Fox, have worked with Student Affairs, led by Chris Wise, to develop an affordable
housing initiative that has held several public forums for the town. The report from this study has been

shared broadly and zoning and policy changes are being considered by the town government as a result
of this outreach work.
During the 2022-2023 school year, interns routinely held public facing events at the farmers market in
Blacksburg and other locations where it was helpful to educate the public about sustainability initiatives.
The students were given the opportunity to develop their own educational materials around a variety of
topics they were interested in, such as rainwater collection or waste remediation, and then take these
educational projects out into the community. Every year since it began, the Office of Sustainability
interns have engaged in at least one and usually several public facing projects to facilitate community
education.
The Green Tailgate team has continued to operate each year and works with student volunteers to
engage the public in recycling during Virginia Tech football games. Groups of approximately 15-30
students distribute recycling bags and share information about what can be recycled to tailgaters,
diverting hundreds of pounds of waste. Additionally, because of the success of this program we have
piloted a green game program for basketball as well to try and capitalize on community facing waste
diversion efforts.
The Earth Week planning committee is another site where we solicit public engagement. Drawing from a
wide pool of supporters, the university works with the town officials from the Town of Blacksburg to
organize a public facing event that keeps the public informed about the university’s climate progress
and hosts a wealth of enjoyable sustainability-oriented events and opportunities. Additionally, the
university’s outreach and extension services have continued to build a strong relationship with public
partners across the Commonwealth of Virginia to support environmental work and research that
supports the local communities they operate in.

The Campus Energy Manager and Environmental Engineer are responsible for monitoring our
greenhouse gas emissions and tracking our progress for reduction. Student interns are brought onto the
team in order to assist them with the gathering of data and with displaying that in a digestible format.
This team of students and staff also work alongside Professor Sean McGinnis to ensure all collected data
are comprehensive and include all of scope 1, scope 2, and as much of scope 3 is measurable. Dr.
McGinnis combines this work with his green engineering program to provide his students meaningful
data to work with and experiential learning through the collection of difficult to quantify scope 3
emissions that are very useful for accurately assessing our carbon impact.

Jason Pearman (Building Automation System Supervisor) takes students in a variety of engineering
classes (about 100-150 people per class each year) to tour the mechanical systems in Cowgill Hall and
the Southwest Chiller Plant. The Cowgill Hall tour has benefited the students by allowing them to see
one of the largest air handling units on campus, and in some cases to even walk inside it. Cowgill Hall is
an especially good building for this tour because the mechanical systems are partially exposed in the
ceiling, and the students typically take classes in this building so it allows them to relate those systems
to their day-to-day life. The Southwest Chiller Plant tours were insightful for explaining the energy and
water impact of our cooling systems to engineering students.

Jack Leff, the Climate Action Fellow, also worked with several engineering classes to assist them work on
semester long design projects for building efficiency improvements. These included working to develop
automated lighting and HVAC systems to cut down on building energy use, remediation plots outside of
drainage pipes to assist in runoff management from buildings, wastes management strategies to ensure
clean and recyclable waste streams within buildings, and several other improvements. Over 300
students participated in these living laboratory projects and the most promising projects were
encouraged to be submitted for implementation through the university’s green RFP program, which
funds student projects that lead to tangible changes to the campus built environment.
The office of sustainability student interns, in particular the energy team, worked to examine and reduce
energy usage on campus through novel outreach and engagement campaigns. This team worked closely
with the office of energy management to ensure university buildings were running efficiently. The water
team also worked with GIS experts at the university to map out the full suite of water bottle refill
stations in buildings to create an inventory and maintenance plan. This work directly tied into their
future career interests and built hands-on skills with managing large-scale facilities.

The steam plant is a strong example of how Virginia Tech uses campus facilities as a living laboratory for
transdisciplinary student learning and applied research. Our co-generation lant provides steam for hot
water and chilled water for air conditioning. Its steam turbine also provides a small but significant
amount of energy for the university’s operations. Students get to tour and work on efficiency
improvements for each of these elements of the steam plant through both class partnerships and a
regular office of energy management internship. In addition, the steam plant hosts local high school
students interested in a professional education for tours and educational opportunities in order to
engage the community.
Recently, there has been additional exploration of how to integrate research faculty into energy
projects. Partnering with introductory level engineering classes, energy efficiency projects were
developed in cooperation with the office of energy management and other stakeholders. These projects
were then encouraged to be submitted to the green RFP program, which would fund these student led
initiatives. Additionally, the office of energy management have partnered with electrical engineering
faculty Drs. Chen-Ching Liu and Eric Burger to increase the scope of their federal and state grant
applications for energy storage and management projects. These projects would not only have research
components, but treat the campus as a living laboratory by improving local infrastructure and using it
experimentally.
Lastly, the university has been exploring the potential for agrivoltaics solar panel development to meet
our goal of 100% renewable energy by 2030. As a land-grant university with a large agricultural research
portfolio, we have begun work on a feasibility study for agrivoltaics at the Catawba farmsite by
partnering with faculty member Ron Meyers. This project engages the research faculty already working
on these sites and incorporates energy research components into their agricultural research,
transforming Virginia Tech land into energy development projects.

Homefield farms is a partnership between Dining Services and the College of Agriculture and Life
Sciences. The six-acre educational farm grows fruits, vegetables, and herbs for Virginia Tech Dining
Services, and serves as a site of experiential student learning, interdisciplinary research, and community
outreach. Homefield Farm Stand is a pop up stand placed outside of Turner place dining hall every
Tuesday from 2:30-5:30PM, which allows students to purchase fresh produce right on campus. The farm
manager, Alex hassler, teaches hands-on classes at Homefield Farms. These classes allow students to
gain valuable sustainable agricultural experience while also growing food for dining services.
Recently, Virginia Tech has expanded its food pantry service, the Market, to support more students than
ever before. This is due in no small part to a faculty partnership with Dr. Ralph Hall to evaluate the food
insecurity of the campus. Taking up the ethos that it’s important to diagnose a problem in order to
tackle it most effectively, Ralph’s team has completed two food insecurity studies for campus, first in
2019 and then again in 2023. These studies have directly led to more student food programs and have
supported the Market’s work directly.
In 2021, Virginia Tech also developed its first Food Studies program in the College of Liberal Arts and
Human Sciences, led by Anna Zeide, that seeks to engage students in food justice work across campus. It
has put forward a speaker series and partnered with local indigenous leaders to educate the community
on indigenous agricultural and food practices.

Dr. Eric Wiseman pays quite a bit of attention to the campus urban forest because it is instructive to see how trees respond and develop over time. He uses observations to support his teaching and to incorporate examples of the good and the bad on campus. He brings things he observes to the attention of members of the Facilities Department, with the hope that this information can help improve campus operations, and thereby campus sustainability.

He uses the campus urban forest as an instructional space throughout his courses. In most cases, these activities only indirectly benefit campus sustainability. For example, students his classes probably share with their peers or instructors what they learn on campus and this raises awareness of campus sustainability. Or, we might observe something problematic with campus trees that we then report to campus operations. Other times, we do things that are more directly beneficial. For example, he has instructional labs on tree pruning, planting, and cultivation in a couple of my courses, and we often end up planting or tending trees on campus during labs. We’ve also created tree inventories or reports on occasion that have been utilized by campus operations. The courses that I teach extensively on-campus include: Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation courses FREC 2254, FREC 3354, FREC 3454, and FREC 4454.

His students do a good bit of service-learning on campus. They are involved each year with service projects revolving around Sustainability Week, Earth Day, and Arbor Day. Most commonly they have done tree planting, but we’ve also held educational activities on campus to raise awareness about urban forests on Arbor Day.

P. Eric Wiseman, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Urban Forestry, pwiseman@vt.edu,(540) 231-5148, Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, College of Natural Resources and Environment.

Office of University Planning Site Planner Bob Massengale has worked with a number of students in support of Pamela Vickers (Director ADA and Access) Accessibility Program with activities including site visits, design and development meetings and feedback sessions. Bob works with Dr. Wiseman on tree and plant performance and testing, Dr. Susan Day (Associate Professor, Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation) in exploring better soil remediation and preparation strategies, and Dr. Holly Scoggins (Associate Professor, Department of Horticulture) on perennials a the Hahn Horticulture Garden.

Bob Massengale, Site Planner, Office of University Planning, mmassen@vt.edu, (540) 231-4961, Facilities Department.

Virginia Tech recently earned its Bee Campus USA certification and has been involving students in that process. Students serve on the standing committee, help design and source funding for pollinator habitats, assist in updating relevant policies through the Climate Action, Sustainability, and Energy Committee, and practice Ut Prosim (That I May Serve) by helping to maintain our pollinator habitats during service learning events hosted by other faculty and staff connected to the projects.

In 2022, Virginia Tech set up the sustainable procurement subcommittee in its shared governance
structure to support the Green Lab and Green office certification programs. Thse programs work with
faculty members and staff to green their respective spaces but also have offered opportunities for
graduate student and faculty research around waste reduction. These efforts have been led by graduate
student Yugasha Bakshi who has engaged faculty across campus in sustainable behavior change.
Additionally, these programs are explored among peer institutions through engagement with
sustainable procurement conferences and professional societies allowing faculty, staff, and students to
have engaged learning opportunities with experts in the field.
This same subcommittee has also worked to have the university adopt an experimental sustainable
procurement policy. This includes working with Mary Helmick in procurement to identify challenges and
barriers to sustainability and working among students, faculty, and staff to address those problems at a
policy level. This work began in 2022 and is ongoing as the students identify political challenges at the
state level that must be overcome through the application of novel educational and research programs.

The Alternative Transportation unit of Parking and Transportation is directly responsible for the pgorams
at the university aimed at creating a sustainable working environment for all faculty, staff, and students.

This is accomplished through multiple programs and with the assistance of several undergraduate and
graduate student interns. The student interns are given an opportunity to develop program
management skills and to use their passions for sustainability to help further the goals of the university.
The programs of the unit are described below:
Nick Quint, the head of Alternative Transportation, served as an advisor to student interns from the
Office of Sustainability as well as graduate students from 2020-2023 to assist in updating the university’s
Bike Parking and Electric Vehicle master plans. These master plans detail the university’s plans for
accommodating the growth of the campus and student body along with the widespread adoption of
electric vehicles. The plans’ goals are to create equitable and sufficient bike parking and develop the
university’s charging capacity in a way that is community focused.
Office of Sustainability student interns also worked with the office of alternative transportation to
develop a parking master plan and encourage students and faculty to adopt alternative ways of getting
to campus than single-occupancy vehicles. There were a wide range of engagement and research
opportunities associated with this, but it gave the students an opportunity to experiment with different
innovative strategies and techniques.
Blacksburg Transit provides public transportation for faculty, staff, and students of Virginia Tech, who
make up 95% of passengers on the transit system. Virginia Tech employees and students ride fair free to
increase the accessibility of this program. Transportation options outside of Blacksburg include the
SmartWay shuttle (Valley Metro Transit), providing service between Roanoke and Virginia Tech Campus.
Other options include the SmartWay connector, College Transit, Home Ride of Virginia, and Megabus to
help faculty, staff, and students get from Blacksburg campus to locations within and out of Virginia.

The Office of Sustainability sponsors the “Tailgate Recycling Program” for home football games. Our
student Tailgate Recycling Coordinator is responsible for planning and executing the event with
assistance from the facilities department and volunteers. Additionally, this work has expanded to
include basketball games as well and operating waste redirection program within the stadium.
Volunteers assemble near the athletic facilities and receive training on proper trash and recycling
disposal, then are sent out to tailgaters and spectators to encourage sustainable waste practices.
The Environmental Student Organization, a student club, works with the Office of Sustainability and
campus waste manager to operate a “Battery Recycling Program.” Collection containers were placed in
strategic locations across campus to collect battery waste and then the students organize the safe pick
up and recycling. In the past, the only option students had to recycle batteries was to bring them across
campus to the Environmental Health and Safety warehouse. This program allows students to take the
lead in designing and implementing a waste reduction program.
In 2021 the university hired its first campus waste manager, Theresa Sweeney. She has worked to
engage faculty and students in standardizing our waste streams. Her first standardization project was at
the Virginia Tech library, working with students and library staff to develop an effective strategy for the
wide-ranging waste streams the library deals with.
In July of 2023, we completed our first waste audit and compost facility strategic plan. This proposed
facility would contain aerostatic piles of compostable material and is proposed to be developed at the

Kentland Farms research site. This would not only provide convenient access for campus waste, it would
also allow faculty and students to learn from the composting facility and perform research experiments
on more effective ways of organizing compost.

The Office of Sustainability water interns have worked consistently to build and deploy a rainwater
barrel collection system for both the university and community. This project, spanning AY2021-2022,
was intended to encourage building managers and community members to adopt rainwater collection
barrel systems for their own properties to save on water waste. While the pandemic interfered with the
full scope of the projects, the students still were able to work with Office of Sustainability staff to have
several community facing training events at the farmers market and other locations to advertise this
work.
Additionally, partnerships with classes such as Dr. Jennifer Benning’s have led to several water related
experiential learning projects. Most notably, in Summer 2023, several groups of students worked on
rainwater remediation project proposals for the president’s manor under the guidance of wastewater
treatment experts on campus.

Earth Week has traditionally been a cooperative effort between student organizations, most notably the
Environmental Coalition, and the Office of sustainability. As the event has expanded to encompass an
entire week of activities and programs, the level of coordination has also broadened to match the scale.
While previously the event was held just on April 22 nd , now the event is held on that entire week of April
and boasts over 35 events. Earth Week is planned months in advance through repeated sustainability
forums between staff members, student leaders, faculty, town government officials, and community
organizations who come together to plan and develop the most interesting programming for the week.
Each day is then themed after a different major sustainability goal such as energy, food, justice, water,
or education.
The Office of Sustainability also oversees an award-winning Student Sustainability Intern program.
Students are organized into teams around specific categories including water, energy, waste, and food
to work on self-selected projects under the mentorship of Office of Sustainability staff. Team members
meet weekly to plan and coordinate events and activities that will promote sustainability on campus
through either outreach events or the development of concrete projects to help Virginia Tech meet its
climate goals. All intern members meet biweekly in a large group to share their progress and report back
to the Office broadly. Each student has the opportunity to become a team leader and plan their own
event with all the logistical details worked out under the guidance of a local expert at the university.
Additionally, the elevation of the Climate Action, Sustainability, and Energy committee in shared
governance has led to improvements in sustainable planning across campus. This committee previously
reported to a commission that had several stakeholders from across campus but very few high-level
administrators. After the Climate Action Commitment passed in 2021, the committee was elevated in
2022 and now reports directly to a team led by the Provost for the university Cyril Clarke as well as the
President Tim Sands. The membership of the committee has broadened to include major decision

makers to encompass this additional organizational commitment as well and facilitates more significant
planning and operations.

When Virginia Tech approved its 2020 Climate Action Commitment in March of 2021, it committed to
adopting climate justice as a core tenet of the university’s operations. This has led to several diversity
initiatives around sustainability on campus including major structural changes.
In the university’s shared governance system, the Energy and Sustainability committee was renamed to
the Climate Action, Sustainability, and Energy Committee to reflect the higher-level commitment to the
new Climate Action commitment. Two frontline community member positions were added to the
committee in order to broaden our representation from communities most affected by the effects of
climate change. Several subcommittees were developed including the Climate Justice subcommittee,
which is a team of faculty, students, and staff members who work to implement the principle of climate
justice across the institution. They have a large membership base of over 25 people and are working on
developing a climate justice line of communication to capital construction to ensure infrastructural
projects moving forward take into account climate justice considerations.
In AY2022-2023, the university announced its access and affordability initiative, which was adopted by
the Board of Visitors. This group meets regularly to discuss reducing tuition burden on students and
especially marginalized student populations. This is a $45 million initiative and investment in the
ongoing affordability of Virginia Tech for its students that will be supported through both philanthropic
and financial reorganization. One project that is being explored are different ownership models for the
university’s renewable energy portfolio that could be poured back into the access and affordability
initiative.
The art community has also stepped up to embrace the principles of climate justice. The Moss Art center
is hosting a climate justice series of speakers and artistic installations in the AY23-24 programming
including several prominent indigenous activists. This represents an increasing attention paid to the
climate justice component of the CAC broader engagement from across campus offices.
The university’s Office of Inclusion and Diversity also maintains a long list of programs, living learning
opportunities, and other DEI educational opportunities as part of its mission
(https://www.provost.vt.edu/who_we_are/inclusion_diversity.html). For an exhaustive list it is
recommended to review the office’s list of events and practices along with inclusive VT’s mission
(https://www.inclusive.vt.edu/).
Additionally, there have been several high level commitments from the university to support its staff
and graduate student community members around the key issue of financial accessibility. In AY2021-
2922, because of a push from graduate students and economic pressures, the university adopted a
universal $15/hr minimum wage ahead of state guidelines and continues to evaluate staff pay as a major
affordability issue for the region. In that same academic year, the university committed to pursuing a
living stipend for graduate students thanks to the hard work of graduate students themselves, leading to
a task force being formed to lay out the financial plan in AY2022-2023 and the first set of policy
implementation taking place in AY2023-2024. This project will evaluate graduate student compensation

and affordability on an ongoing basis in order to continue to meet cost of living for graduate students
moving forward.

The Green Request for Proposal program (Green RFP), led by the Office of Sustainability and various
environmental student organizations, was established in 2010 to give students an opportunity to
propose projects for improving the built environment of campus. Students are given the opportunity
each year to submit a proposal for a sustainable idea that they would like to see implemented on the
University’s Blacksburg campus. The goal of the program is to have approved proposals funded and
implemented within the same academic year. As of May 2023, the program has approved over 100
student projects totaling more than $2 million in investments for climate action initiatives. Students are
able to directly line their interests and goals with those of the university by partnering with experts from
across campus to create viable requests. Currently, the program is being restructured to build on the
successes of past years and focus even more heavily on student engagement, effectively turning over
leadership of the program to the students so they can work with experts to prioritize projects in addition
to proposing them.
One of the most successful class partnerships has been through showcasing the Green RFP program to
classes. During the last several academic years, we have presented the Green RFP program to hundreds
of students, mostly in engineering but also in other disciplines, who have gone on to propose their own
climate projects. For instance, Dr. Kelly Scarff’s engineering design course in Spring of 2023 had roughly
300 students broken up into teams who each had to submit a Green RFP proposal to Dr. Scarff as part of
a class assignment. The top ideas from this process were then converted to actual Green RFP
submissions and sent to our office for consideration. We have seen year-after-year growth because of
the extensive class partnerships and outreach we do every year.
Lastly, the university is experimenting with different innovative financing proposals to support students
and community members. The most prominent is the access and affordability initiative, which seeks to
drive down educational costs for all students at Virginia Tech but especially those who are typically
economically disadvantaged. Additionally, the aforementioned living wage initiatives and increases to
the minimum wage have had a substantial impact on not just the university operations but also
community investments in its employees.

The Hokie Wellness department in Student Affairs collaborates with campus partners to offer cooking
and gardening classes as a way to encourage students and employees to learn how to grow their own
food. Nutrition classes and other wellness focused programs are also routinely offered to all members of
the campus community in order to address ongoing struggles with food insecurity, sustainability, and
identifying healthy options.