Sustainability

The county fair offers food and fun, and thanks to UC Merced, this year’s Merced County Fair will also feature an interactive space for kids to learn.

UC Merced’s Mobile Maker Space is an innovative mobile science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) hub with hands-on activities and workshops geared toward students in kindergarten through high school. Attendees have an opportunity to experience the Mobile Maker Space at the fair’s Discovering Science exhibit before it launches to the public early next year.

Three big UC Solar projects are poised to be the next big breakthroughs in low-cost, accessible sustainable commercial and residential energy in California and far beyond.

Researchers are building working models of one project developed through a grant from the California Energy Commission for a solar unit that can provide electricity and heat to commercial and residential buildings.

With nearly a third of all food worldwide being wasted and millions of people going hungry every day, preventing food from going to waste is a crucial operation.

The Bobcat Eats Food Waste Awareness and Prevention Program may have a long name, but in a short amount of time it is playing a major role in curtailing food waste in Merced County by rescuing food that would otherwise go to waste.

Growing up in San Juan Bautista, Vanessa Andrade loved hanging out with her father and his collection of cars and tractors.

She spent hours in the “barn” or shop, helping change the oil in cars, playing with tools and tinkering with her grandfather’s old Allis-Chalmers tractor. So perhaps it’s no surprise that this UC Merced senior — and Chancellor’s Scholar — found her academic calling in mechanical engineering.

On Dec. 15, Andrade will participate in the university’s fall commencement ceremony. She next plans to pursue a master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

It’s the crown jewel of sustainability — a platinum certification signifying all the steps to making a space sustainable have been met.

For UC Merced, platinum certification had eluded the Green Labs and Green Offices programs. That changed recently when the Office of the Chancellor achieved platinum Green Offices status and biology labs directed by School of Natural Sciences instructional lab coordinator Jim Whalen secured platinum Green Labs certification.

As UC Merced continues to lead the way in sustainability on university campuses, a new wrinkle has been added to the process of certifying buildings.

Recently, the Science and Engineering 1 (SE1) building achieved gold certification under LEED Operations and Maintenance (LEED O & M) criteria. Certification is nothing new to the campus — every building at UC Merced is LEED certified or on track to be certified.

But who has begun to handle the certification process is groundbreaking.

California aims to lead the nation — and the globe — in climate change research, policy and action — in large part through climate-focused research conducted at University of California campuses and labs.

Some of that research, including from UC Merced, will be on display this week as climate-change scientists, policymakers and trailblazers from around the globe gather in San Francisco for the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit .

UC Merced demonstrated that it’s living up to its reputation for being “green from the ground up” by winning five awards — more than any other University of California campus — in the 14th annual Higher Education Energy Efficiency and Sustainability Best Practice Awards.

UC Merced has a new Sustainability Strategic Plan to help the campus further advance its sustainability goals.

Chancellor Dorothy Leland joined fellow higher education leaders this week to discuss new climate action at the Second Nature 2018 Higher Education Climate Leadership Summit in Tempe, Ariz.

On Monday, Leland spoke as part of a four-member panel focused on “The New Normal: 100 percent Clean Energy.”