Sustainability News

To meet an increasing demand for sustainability education, ASU's School of Sustainability has made its offerings even more accessible. Now, students at ASU's Polytechnic campus can enroll in the school's popular undergraduate degree programs, like its Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science in sustainability. Its 18-credit minor in sustainability is also available to Poly students, and makes a strong complement to virtually any major. Students attending a Maricopa County Community College may be eligible for MAPP.

Students at the School of Sustainability are reinventing the future of a world at risk. The school's programs introduce students to the concept of sustainability and how its application can transform the world for the better. This program is transdisciplinary, drawing from many academic fields. Students explore the interaction between societal, economic, and environmental factors and develop solutions to challenges at the local, regional and global levels.

Marina Acosta graduated from the School of Sustainability in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in the Policy and Governance track. She also minored in Psychology.

Currently, Acosta is in the Master of Science Obesity Prevention and Management program at ASU.

Why did you choose Arizona State University?

ASU is my home and I couldn’t imagine going anywhere else. I did not apply for any other schools. This was close enough to my family and allowed me to experience great diversity while receiving a top-notch education. Also, I’ve always wanted to make a difference and when I learned about the School of Sustainability, I knew that there would always be something for me to do. I thought it was an innovative and fast-growing field, and I was right.

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Leonardo Beltrán Rodríguez, undersecretary for planning and energy transition under Mexico’s Secretary of Energy, is managing the most significant reform of Mexico’s energy sector in more than 70 years – and ASU is helping him do it. In June 2016, Beltrán met with ASU leaders to formalize a relationship of future collaboration in energy research and education.

“ASU is one of the premier universities in the U.S. in terms of energy research, with nationally recognized centers...,” said Stephen Goodnick, deputy director of ASU LightWorks. “ASU also has strong partnerships within Mexico, with more than $35 million worth of projects related to Mexico either in partnership with Mexican entities or with a focus on Mexican topics, cultures or materials.”

Brendan Denker is a Fall 2012 graduate of the School of Sustainability's Master of Science program. He also received a Bachelor of Arts in General Engineering, and a minor in French Cultural Studies from Johns Hopkins University.

Denker works as an engineer at Salt River Project, where he's been employed for the last three years. He focuses on long-term planning within the Western U.S. electric grid, represents SRP’s interests with other entities, and is involved with tracking the water-energy nexus at SRP’s power plants.

Why did you choose to study at ASU’s School of Sustainability?

I had always been interested in sustainability. I grew up immersed in recycling, composting and having empathy for others – which I always assumed was a normal, second-nature thing. However, when I got to college, it was a bit of a culture shock, because doing those things was not the norm.

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Jin Jo – a native of Seoul, South Korea – graduated from the School of Sustainability in 2010. He received the first PhD in sustainability and was a member of ASU's jazz band.

Jo is currently an associate professor of technology at Illinois State University and the associate director at the Center for Renewable Energy. In February 2016, he and two other faculty members at Illinois State University were recipients of the Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Team Research Award.

Why did you choose the School of Sustainability at ASU?

I did my master’s degree at Columbia University, then applied for PhD programs at a few different places, including Columbia and Princeton. Although I was admitted to another university, I found the School of Sustainability was a perfect fit for what I had in mind – to explore a variety of strategies to achieve urban system sustainability.

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Homeowners associations are good for water conservation, according to a study led by Senior Sustainability Scientist Elizabeth Wentz.

Upon analyzing water-use records for properties throughout several neighborhoods in Goodyear, Arizona, Wentz and her research team found that houses in HOAs used significantly less water than those that were not. They also found that houses in HOAs had less vegetation overall, even when minimum vegetation requirements were listed among the HOAs' rules.

The team concluded that a sense of community, coupled with fines for non-conformers, make homes in HOAs more likely to observe an area’s social and environmental norms – even if those norms are never codified in law. If HOAs shaped their standards to reflect environmentally-friendly landscaping, they could save thousands of gallons of water per household every year.

One hundred miles west of Phoenix, a Saudi Arabian-owned farming operation called Almarai grows alfalfa for hay year-round. Why would a foreign company grow one of the most water-intensive crops in the desert of La Paz County, Arizona? And what does this mean for the future of water resources in the state?

"Camels don't fly, deserts don't bloom" is a 2016 documentary by a team of seven ASU students from five countries – three of whom are enrolled in the School of Sustainability. Under the guidance of sustainability scientist Peter Byck, director of Carbon Nation, the 15-minute film explores the questions raised by this agricultural anomaly.

2015 was another momentous year for the ASU Wrigley Institute, with multiple milestones in solutions, engagement, education and research. School of Sustainability professor Arianne Cease was named among the Popular Science Brilliant 10, the international Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network was established with a $12 million grant, and the Walton Global Sustainability Solutions Services presented a plan to green Albania's schools to the prime minister of that country.

Eight ASU sustainability scientists, scholars and fellows attended the historic U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference in Paris, School of Sustainability grad student Anna Bettis asked Democratic presidential candidates for their climate change commitments during a televised CNN debate, and household names Tom Friedman and M. Sanjayan joined our growing list of distinguished Wrigley Lecturers.

And that's just a sampling. For a more in-depth look at what we accomplished last year, flip through our newly-released 2015 Sustainability Highlights magazine.

The Valley of the Sun Clean Cities Coalition is one of 90 coalitions across the country designated by the U.S. Department of Energy to reduce the use of petroleum motor fuel. These efforts are directed under the Clean Air Act and Energy Policy Act to reduce air pollution and dependence on foreign oil.

Every two years, Valley of the Sun and Tucson Regional Coalitions stage a Legislative Breakfast, where legislators, staff and civic leaders are invited to learn the latest in the means of reducing the use of petroleum fuel. This event features key speakers and a comprehensive display of alternative fuel vehicles.

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Within months of the Paris climate talks, more than 20 city officials from around the world gathered in Washington, D.C. for a "how-to" on inventorying sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The training – led by Raj Buch, practice lead for the Walton Global Sustainability Solutions Services – helped attendees determine where emissions cuts are most needed.

Twenty-one city officials attended, from countries including Argentina, India, South Africa, Korea, Bolivia, China and Bangladesh. All of them were clients of World Bank, an organization that mainly finances Third World infrastructure projects and is concerned about the effects climate change will have on them.

Bank officials asked the School of Sustainability to design and deliver a curriculum around this topic, as it had done for other topics in the past. The workshop will be produced in an online format, as well.

Andrew Krause is a two-time graduate of the School of Sustainability. He was a member of the first cohort of graduating undergraduates in 2009, and also received a Master of Science in 2012.

Andrew is now the CEO of eecosphere, which he co-founded while at ASU. eecosphere connects responsible brands with conscious consumers online through social advocacy campaigns. The platform helps users adopt new sustainability behaviors into their lives, and gives them tools to scale their daily actions into global revolutions.

Why did you choose to study at ASU’s School of Sustainability?

I’m not your prototypical “tree hugger,” but I’ve always been fascinated by the complexities that make up sustainable change in a system. Originally, I wanted to be in the construction engineering field. However, I quickly became more intrigued by the way sustainability science has the potential to motivate and empower the mainstream to collectively engage with complex global issues.

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Jeffrey Jennings graduated from the School of Sustainability in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts, focusing on Society and Sustainability. He also has a Professional Science Masters in Science and Technology Policy from ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society.

Jennings works as a sustainability project coordinator for Arizona Public Service, where he focuses on corporate social responsibility and how to make APS a more sustainable company. He was named among the 2016 GreenBiz "30 Under 30" for his leadership in the sustainability field.

Why did you choose to study at ASU’s School of Sustainability?

Before choosing ASU, I considered Northern Arizona University and University of Arizona. It was a bit of a journey. I had always been attracted to multiple disciplines but wasn’t sure it would be possible to successfully combine my interests into one major. Initially, I started out in accounting and quickly realized that it wasn’t a good fit. Next, I strongly considered urban planning or supply chain before landing on sustainability.

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School of Sustainability student Bridget Harding's love of the Korean language, which she studied throughout high school and her time at ASU, has shaped her path in a few profound ways.

First, it prompted her to study abroad in South Korea, where she became interested in East vs. West perspectives on nature and ecology. It also became a point of intrigue for potential employers, who viewed that the knack for learning such a difficult language as an indicator of other aptitudes – like learning difficult computer programs.

Harding was admitted into the Fulbright Scholarship Program in South Korea, where she will teach English for at least one year. She is one of the 118  uniquely-talented students to graduate from the School of Spring in 2016.

by Alex Slaymaker, Master of Sustainability Solutions

Typical events include people who know each other talking about the weather and their to-dos.

But ASU’s School of Sustainability is far from typical. A group of undergraduate and graduate students decided to elevate the conversation to topics that matter during the School of Sustainability’s 10-year anniversary celebration on April 14, 2016.

The all-day celebration included a Rescued Food Feast, featuring food with approaching expiration dates or small bruises that was "rescued" from the landfill by a local grocery store. The event was hosted during lunchtime in the middle of campus, where the School of Sustainability offered the free food to engage students, staff, faculty, alumni and community members in the celebration of sustainability efforts at ASU and beyond.

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In a May 2016 article in Huffpost Green, the directorate of the ASU Wrigley Institute examines the question, "Can universities save the planet?"

In the piece, authors Rob Melnick, Gary Dirks and Chris Boone contend that practical solutions to the mega-problems we face are not being implemented quickly enough. They attribute this gap, in part, to the incremental advance of these problems – too difficult to see for many people to take seriously.

Universities – with their vast portfolio of expertise – can be instrumental in closing this gap, say the authors. But only if they move from the current model, where knowledge generation and dissemination is the sole goal, to one where solution implementation is the desired end.

One of the nation’s top experts on algae, ASU sustainability scientist Milton Sommerfeld, has spent half of a century exploring the possibilities of the plant as a super food, fuel, fertilizer and more.

Sommerfeld – co-director of the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation at ASU's Polytechnic campus – explains that there are roughly 75,000 different types of algae, and that certain strains are more optimal for given uses than others.

According to Sommerfeld, the most immediate impact from algae will be in bioremediation – a waste management technique that uses organisms to remove or neutralize pollutants from a contaminated site. He expects commercial algal biofuels further down the line, as production will require scaling the small cultivation operations of the present to an industrial level.

To help address the mounting challenges of Africa's most populous city – Lagos, Nigeria – the Global Sustainability Solutions Services of ASU’s Walton Initiatives hosted a three-day workshop there in April 2016.

The first of its kind in the world, the "Introduction to Ethical Circular Economy" workshop was hosted at Sustainability School Lagos – an institution modeled after ASU's Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. It encouraged the group of 35 students, city and state officials, and others to imagine an economy where resources are remanufactured, refurbished and recycled – nothing is wasted.

“There is a tremendous amount of potential for a circular economy in rapidly developing countries,” said Senior Sustainability Scientist and Practice Lead Raj Buch. “It’s where the larger opportunity arises because it’s where most of the economic development is going to happen.”

Buch co-led the course with General Manager Dan O’Neill and Olufemi Olarewaju – an Executive Master of Sustainability Leadership graduate and the executive director of the Sustainability School Lagos.

An ASU undergraduate project called “Phoenix,” which will design and build a bread loaf-sized satellite, has been awarded $200,000 by the NASA Space Grant Undergraduate Student Instrument Program. The satellite, called a “3U CubeSat,” will use thermal infrared imaging to investigate how human activity and weather create urban heat islands around the Valley.

"Phoenix" follows an interdisciplinary model, made up of students and faculty from the School of Sustainability, among others. Though faculty and a graduate student will be mentors on the project, the team of more than 25 undergraduate students will be designing, promoting, building and running it from beginning to end.

“This project is history in the making,” said School of Earth and Space Exploration associate professor Judd Bowman, the project’s principal investigator. “No undergraduate student group at ASU has run a satellite in space before.”

Chandler, Arizona native Kayla Bellman graduates from the School of Sustainability in Spring 2016 with a Bachelor of Science in the Sustainable Energy, Materials and Technology track. She will also receive a Bachelor of Arts in Global Studies with a Certificate in Human Rights.

What does sustainability mean to you?

To me, sustainability is the action of pursuing a just world. It is an act grander than one person, one community, and one nation. It demands the attention of the global community, immediately.

What was your “aha” moment, when you realized you wanted to study sustainability?

Growing up, I believed the medical field was the only way to “do good” – all my aunts and uncles are in the medical field. The product of two engineers, I was determined to do just about anything other than engineering.

Over the course of my senior year in high school, I came to the conclusion that environmental work could also fulfill my desire to “do good.” I found the School of Sustainability through a Google search, and I realized the best-of-the-best was in my backyard.

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Anna Jean Bettis graduated with a Bachelor of Arts – International Development from the School of Sustainability in 2014. This spring, the Kankakee, Illinois native graduates again - this time with her Masters of Sustainability Solutions.

What was your “aha” moment, when you realized you wanted to study sustainability?

During my senior year in high school in a marine biology course, there was a small section at the end about environmental destruction in the oceans. Up until this point, I was totally unaware of the massive environmental crisis we faced.

I took it upon myself to read more about environmental problems, from mass extinctions to the shifts in availability of water due to climate change. I was shocked and felt an urgency to be part of the solution. I had already planned to go to ASU, so when I learned that the School of Sustainability was a leader – the first in the nation – I was excited to apply!

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