Awards & Recognition

As the University of Washington football team prepares for its first home game of the season, the Huskies have already earned a No. 1 ranking as the most sustainable football school.

Harborview Medical Center and University of Washington Medical Center have each been selected for the Top 25 Environmental Excellence Award from Practice Greenhealth.  The Top 25 Award recognizes health care facilities across the country that exemplify environmental excellence and is setting the highest standards for environmental practices in health care.  This is the third consecutive year that HMC has won the top award from Practice Greenhealth and the eighth consecutive year for UWMC to receive the top award.

The University of Washington has been named to the Princeton Review’s Green Honor Roll for the fourth straight year, earning a perfect Green Rating.

UW has earned the highest possible 99 rating six out of seven years since The Princeton Review began its Green Rating program. The university was one of 24 schools to earn the award out of 861 schools reviewed.

ESS Associate Vice President Ruth Johnston was given the Professional Development Award by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) at their 2014 annual meeting in Seattle.

The award recognizes outstanding individual contributions to NACUBO professional development activities as well as the association's publication programs.

The University of Washington is one of four universities worldwide, and the only one from the United States, named this week as a Sustainable Campus Excellence Award winner by the International Sustainable Campus Network.

The awards, presented June 3 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recognize sustainable campus projects that demonstrate leadership, creativity, effectiveness and performance in the areas of building, campus, integration and student leadership.

On the outside, it’s a basic, affordable, midsized Chevy Malibu.

But on the inside it’s a hybrid like no other, with two separate engines — one biodiesel, the other electric — that together give it the muscle of, well, a muscle car, not the faint and tentative speed of some hybrids.

For the past three years, a team of University of Washington students has designed, planned, tested, rebuilt, rewired and re-engineered the innards of the General Motors car.

Every year 7.2 million tons of food is wasted and thrown away, which releases 17 million tons of CO2. Wasting food costs the environment and economy with landfill production and disposal costs. However, the University of Washington has a great food waste composting program, which provides compostable napkins, cups straws and containers in all dining facilities.

The University of Washington Friday Harbor Labs is receiving a rebate check for $46,230 after completing a substantial lighting efficiency upgrade project in late March.  This retrofit was a component of a larger ESCO project to “green up” facilities.  The lab upgraded to high performance linear bulbs and ballasts and replaced incandescent lighting with LEDs.This will result in an estimated energy savings of 101,333 kWhs annually!

The University of Washington is participating in the Campus Conservation Nationals, a competition to conserve energy and water on campus this month.  The competition is part of a gamification trend -- using game mechanics to engage people to achieve non-game goals. UW views it as education outside the classroom, a catalyst that will change how students think about their lifestyles. 

In time for Earth Day, the UW has been listed among the 22 most environmentally responsible “green colleges” in a guidebook just published by the Princeton Review and the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council.

Those schools all received the highest rating (99) in a 2013 survey of 832 schools in the U.S. and Canada that asked about the institutions’ sustainability related policies, practices and programs. It is the fifth consecutive year UW has been on the “green colleges” list.