The ASUW Student Food Coop is a group of students that are passionate about the environmental impact of food systems and work to educate the UW population. The Student Food Coop exemplifies how to eat consciously, nutritiously, and ethically. Through programs such as the twice-annual Humble Feast event they provide opportunities for students to partake in affordable, sustainable food options. They also offer small workshops, seasonal cookbooks and meetings to engage students and the community in discussions around food sustainability.
UW Sustainability
Husky Green Awards 2022
The 2022 Husky Green Awards ceremony was June 6, 2022 in the Suzzallo Library Smith Room. See photos from the event here.
The Husky Green Awards recognize individuals and groups across all University of Washington campuses who lead the way for sustainability at the University of Washington. This is the 13th year the awards have been awarded by the UW Environmental Stewardship Committee as part of the UW's Earth Day celebrations.
The Husky Green Awards are given to students, faculty and staff from the Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma campuses who show initiative, leadership and dedication. The 2022 recipients are:
ASUW Student Food Cooperative
student group
UW Combined Fund Drive
staff group
Since assuming leadership of UW’s workplace giving campaign in February 2020, Program Manager Jolyn Mason and Workplace Giving Specialist Nicole Reeve-Parker have examined processes and adopted new strategies to reduce waste, be more efficient with resources and embrace sustainability. Over the past two years, the UWCFD has eliminated almost 72,000 pieces of promotional material, including flyers, postcards, one sheets, and bookmarks, and also largely eliminated the use of more than 100,000 pieces of printed forms, letters and envelopes by transitioning to digital. The UWCFD has also worked to highlight non-profits taking on sustainability challenges and partnered with other groups on campus around educational events.
UW-IT Data Center Strategy and Operations Team
staff group
The UW-IT Data Center team continually strives to increase the efficiency of the data centers and underlying infrastructure it operates and maintains in meeting its responsibility to provide reliable space, power, and cooling to customers across campus. The UW Tower Data Center has achieved Energy Star Certification from the EPA every year since 2013, and is the only public university data center to achieve this certification (according to Energy Star).
The Data Center team works with electrical, mechanical, and control system vendors to ensure that efficiency objectives are built into all operational, maintenance, and support processes. For example, the use of an evaporative cooling tower during most of the year eliminates the need to use more energy intensive mechanical cooling systems to cool the data center. In addition, automated control systems are used to monitor and control data center infrastructure and provide metrics that are employed to further tune these systems and increase efficiency on an ongoing basis.
Elizabeth Hansen
Assistant Professor, UW Medicine
Dr. Hansen has been committed to sustainability initiatives since joining the faculty as a pediatric anesthesiologist in 2017. She founded the Seattle Children’s Perioperative Green Team, along with Drs. Sara Greenberg, Hannah Cockrel, Yuanting Zha, CRNA Kimberly Righter-Foss with support from Colleen Groll and Michael Bigelow. The Green Team has conducted a waste audit and educated staff regarding recycling in the operating rooms. Dr. Hansen has given multiple presentations on this topic to audiences within the anesthesiology department at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington, as well as to the emergency department, nursing colleagues, and other organizations.
Together with her anesthesia colleagues Drs. Daniel Low and Lynn Martin, she has started an initiative called Project SPRUCE (Saving our Planet by RedUcing Carbon Emissions). This project tracks the emissions of each anesthetic provided at Seattle Children's Main Hospital and Bellevue Surgery Center. These efforts have led to a more than 6-fold reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from anesthesia inhaled agents at the Laurelhurst campus, and a 9-fold reduction at the Bellevue Surgery Center since 2018.
Jennifer Atkinson
UW Bothell faculty
Jennifer Atkinson’s work as a climate educator targets the mental health impacts and well-being of students and those in our communities. Eco-anxiety is ever present in many of our students, with many experiencing grief, fear, hopelessness, overwhelm, or “pre-traumatic stress” in response to our climate crisis. By focusing on the internal struggles of her students and podcast audience, Jennifer seeks to understand a facet of climate change that is not often acknowledged in higher education. Jennifer’s pioneering podcast "Facing It", along with her UW Bothell course on Climate Grief and Anxiety, have been featured nationwide and prompted students and other audiences to take the emotional dimensions of climate change seriously. In addition to teaching, Jennifer also writes articles and speaks publicly about eco-grief and emphasizes the importance of considering these impacts when addressing climate change strategies.
Kurt Kung
postdoctoral researcher
Kurt Kung is a postdoctoral Bioengineering researcher of the Pollack Lab. He is also a driving force behind Project IF (Indoor Farm), a project exploring the feasibility of vertical farming on campus. Over the past four years, he has dedicated personal time to Project IF, creating a vertical farm pilot in Condon Hall, securing funding, recruiting more than 30 students to help operate the farm and connecting with faculties and groups. To date, more than 100 community members have visited the IF farm in person. Moreover, Project IF has generated more than 300 pounds of lettuce to date, and has donated more than 150 pounds to the U-District Foodbank. Project IF is also intended to be an example for other universities and groups to show the feasibility of indoor growing.
Husky Green Legacy winner: Nancy Rottle
faculty, College of Built Environments
Nancy Rottle has been teaching and researching at the UW since 2001. A licensed landscape architect, her work centers upon design to create places that are ecologically healthy, culturally meaningful, and educationally and experientially resonant. Her scholarship, including the co-authored book Ecological Design, has focused on the application of theory and new practices to regenerate the health of urban and urbanizing environments.
Professor Rottle founded and since 2006 has directed the UW’s Green Futures Research and Design Lab, which addresses questions and projects related to urban green infrastructure. Collaborative projects and publications include the use of waterfronts to treat and reuse stormwater; urban green infrastructure for city streets and college campuses; public space planning and design; pedestrian and active transport environments; green roofs and walls; public engagement to envision positive futures; and the role of green infrastructure in mitigating and adapting to climate change. She co-edited the 2008 special journal edition of Places Journal on Climate Change and Place, and researched this topic in New Zealand supported by a Senior Scholar Fulbright Fellowship.
Professor Rottle has regularly taught courses that integrate water into the planning and design process, from watershed to site scales, integrating knowledge of urban water-based projects from around the world. With support from the Scan Design Foundation, she leads urban design study tours to Denmark and Sweden and collaborates with Gehl Architects of Copenhagen to teach interdisciplinary studios at the UW that merge considerations for ecological, economic, social and physical health. She mentors interns who work jointly with the GFL and Danish design firms to produce and disseminate planning and design guides for equitable, active public spaces, all made accessible via the GFL’s website. Serving as the UW’s Scan Design Endowed Chair in Built Environments for over a decade, she facilitated funding for scores of student exchanges between the UW and Danish universities. Nancy has also led term-long design studios in New Zealand that have focused on ecological, culturally inclusive and climate responsive post-earthquake recovery.
Through the Green Futures Lab as well as design studios, she has empowered countless UW students to imagine what ecological integrity and livability may look like in urban spaces. She has been an advisor and champion for student projects funded by the Campus Sustainability Fund, including the Gould Hall Green Wall and Floating Wetlands projects. These projects engaged dozens of students in planning, designing, implementing, prototyping, researching, and maintaining the designed features. This hands-on learning has helped students gain practical knowledge while also providing educational infrastructure to UW for students to interact with and learn from in the long term.
Husky Green Legacy winner: Warren Gold
emeritus faculty, UW Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences
Warren Gold has been a member of the UW Bothell faculty since 1998, and was instrumental in creating UWB’s Environmental Science degree and the revision of that degree into Conservation and Restoration Science. He has developed and taught a wide range of engaging and challenging environmental courses, and mentored hundreds of students through those course experiences. He also helped found the UW Restoration Ecology Network (UW-REN), which was an outreach of the wetlands restoration on the UW Bothell campus that he helped guide through its successful early development. UW-REN brought together people from all three UW campuses in many different disciplines interested in ecological restoration. UW-REN created a structure for existing courses to engage students in hands-on restoration work in collaboration with community partners. Gold has served as co-director of UW-REN since its inception, and in those 21 years it has completed 166 projects with 905 students representing 31 different academic majors and worked with 50 different community partners from Whidbey Island south to the Nisqually River.
Gold has gone above and beyond throughout his career in his dedication to students, making sure they have access to things like personal advice, equipment, transportation and opportunities needed to succeed. He has also been instrumental in advancing sustainability on the UW Bothell campus, including serving as Co-Chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee for Environmental Sustainability (CACES) and as the Campus Wetland Advisor for 21 years, advocating for a UWB Sustainability Coordinator position and helping to create the UW Bothell Sustainability Action Plan.