Connecting the Dots: Using MIT's Campus as a Test Bed for Sustainability

• Siobhan Carr, Energy Efficiency Program Manager, MIT Facilities
• Jessica Parks, Senior Project Manager, Systems Performance and Turnover
• Christoph Reinhart, Professor and Director, Building Technology Program

MIT’s Building 46 houses the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex: a dynamic group of departments, labs, and institutes dedicated to answering important questions about the function of the human brain. Every day, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the Picower Institute for Learning, and the Simons Center for the Social Brain are conducting groundbreaking research in state-of-the-art lab facilities.

It's no surprise, then, that Building 46 uses a lot of power to keep these facilities up and running—and by “a lot” we mean it accounts for 8 percent of MIT’s total energy usage in a year. 

With such a significant impact on MIT’s energy consumption, it only made sense that Building 46 would become an optimal test bed for MIT’s sustainability-focused work around energy efficiency.

An energy audit identified several opportunities to update the mechanical systems infrastructure in Building 46, including optimization of the room-by-room ventilation rates. These updates would create an estimated 35 percent reduction of energy use, which would in turn lower MIT’s total greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 2 percent.

Jessica Parks, senior project manager, systems performance and turnover in Campus Construction says, “There were definitely some concerns as we headed into the renovation process that we might create hurdles for our researchers. By taking a room-by-room approach to touching all 1,254 spaces in the building, we could achieve our goals, and enable each lab to continue their work uninterrupted.”   

The research-driven response

The work on Building 46 was inspired in part by a 2019 modeling effort of the entire MIT campus by doctorate student Shreshth Nagpal PhD ‘19, undergraduate researcher Jared Hanson ‘19, and Professor Christoph Reinhart which identified the building to have the highest carbon reduction potential on campus.

The easiest way to make a building efficient, ultimately, is to take away the user’s ability to control their own environment. But that kind of umbrella control simply won’t work when the users are conducting the myriad types of research that happen in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex. 

As the project launched, Parks said, “It was important for us to be able to reassure each lab that they would be able to continue their work while our efforts progressed.”

The actual work of the renovation centered on a few key shifts to how energy was being used lab-by-lab: creating custom ventilation and temperature settings for unoccupied labs, optimizing for the required ventilation rates of each lab, and converting fume hoods from constant volume to variable volume.

“We start to see savings as we move through the building, and we expect to fully realize all of our projected savings a year after completion,” says Siobhan Carr, energy efficiency program manager, who was part of the team overseeing the energy audit and lab ventilation performance assessment in the building, noting that the length of time is required for a year-over-year perspective to see the full reduction in energy use. 

There were many lessons learned along the way that helped inform the work being done in each subsequent lab—and with work expanding on energy efficiency measures for more high-energy users on campus, those lessons continue to be critical to the team’s success.

With just a few items left on Building 46’s punch list before the project is complete, Parks is thrilled with how the building’s teams have greeted their renovations—and delighted to hear that they’re paving the way for the work to come by sharing their positive experiences with the teams at Building 76.
 

To learn more about MIT’s Fast Forward commitments, start here. To learn about MIT’s Campus Climate Action-specific efforts, head here. To view the MIT News version of this story, visit here. 

• Les Norford, professor, Department of Architecture
• Jeremy Gregory, executive director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium
• Audun Botterud, principal research scientist for the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
• Steve Lanou, project manager in the MIT Office of Sustainability (MITOS)
• Fran Selvaggio, senior Building Management Systems engineer in the Department of Facilities 
• Daisy Green, Postdoc, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• You Lin, Postdoc, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems 

MIT’s campus links more than 200 buildings that comprise 13.9 million square feet, with 8.3 million square feet dedicated to academic purposes—classrooms, labs, libraries, offices, and more—and 3.3 million in residences.

Keeping these buildings safe and operational is no small feat—and heating and cooling is one of the most critical functions that MIT’s Facilities teams take on each day. Consequently, it’s also one of the biggest areas of impact that Campus Climate Action needs to address. Why?

Today’s campus-wide building management systems simply aren’t built to respond efficiently to the unique needs of thousands of different spaces.

For example, if a classroom is only in use for a couple of hours each day, does it need to be held at a consistent, people-friendly temperature? Do certain labs need to be maintained at a specific temperature—yet within a building that doesn’t need to be heated or cooled to that extent in every space? Does a building mostly in use during standard working hours need to accommodate users who like to work late or come in early?  

Add in the unpredictability and relative extremes of New England’s seasons, the steadily increasing temperature levels we’re seeing as a planet, and the preferences of several thousand unique people, and you’ve got yourself quite a set of variables.

The result? Plenty of inefficiency and wasted resources—and a climate impact in dire need of mitigation. As Jeremy Gregory, executive director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium explains, “Our buildings are the biggest part of our carbon footprint. The inefficiencies there are a paramount problem to solve—and if we’re going to use the campus as a ‘test bed’ for change, we do well to start tackling our biggest hurdles now.”


The research-driven response

Chances are you’ve heard a lot about artificial intelligence (AI)… for better or for worse. While AI’s capacity to write a Hollywood screenplay or create a work of art for MOMA is up for debate, AI can have a powerful impact on our capacity to balance energy needs in complex environments.

If you have a “smart” thermostat in your home, you’ve experienced how sensors in different parts of your space gauge heating and cooling according to the weather outside, the rooms you’re occupying (or not), what you’re doing in those rooms at what times of day, and your personal preferences.

The smart part: your thermostat will either self-adjust to reflect those preferences or will respond according to the way you’ve programmed it to act… ideally in a seamless manner, while you’re comfortably living your life.

Joe Higgins,  Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship, originally pitched the idea of using AI to support campus energy efficiency to students at the 2019 MIT Energy Hack. A fresh challenge was issued to MIT researchers and Facilities teams to collaborate on AI implementation within MIT’s plant—and the AI Pilot Project was born.

As Les Norford, a professor of architecture at MIT, explains, “What works in your house is possible because of the scale—a few sensors across a few rooms have many data points, but nothing like a whole campus. MIT has more buildings, more variables, and more people who demand a certain level of comfort in their environment. But sooner than later, you must tend to your own business!”

Audun Botterud, principal research scientist for the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, conducts research that addresses the need for a decarbonized energy grid, from energy market interactions to designing batteries that store energy more efficiently, and at a greater volume. 

Botterud’s focus makes him the perfect partner to work with a machine learning algorithm that would use data from a set of classroom spaces—for now, all in Building 66. The different needs of each classroom presented an appropriately complex environment to gauge how heating and cooling could be optimized in the face of external weather influences, occupancy needs, and the presence of different heating zones, often a wall or two away.

“This was my first time being involved in a project like this at MIT, and it’s great to be working on something very much at the applied end of the research spectrum,” said Botterud. “This is exactly how we should be using the campus as a ‘test bed’—to pioneer new solutions that we can build out across campus, and then share with the world.”

For Fran Selvaggio, senior building management systems engineer in the Department of Facilities, the first challenge was to ensure the Building Management System was ready before the AI variable was added into the mix. “Our systems wouldn’t functionally interact effectively with AI unless everything was in excellent shape—which is why the first step in innovation often begins with making sure your current systems are optimized.”

As MIT continues to learn from the AI pilot in Building 66, the plan is to scale out further and introduce more buildings into the pilot, and give the AI algorithm more data to work from to optimize MIT’s efficiency across its physical plant.

To learn more about MIT’s Fast Forward commitments, start here. To learn about MIT’s Campus Climate Action-specific efforts, head here.
 

• Brian Goldberg, Assistant Director, Office of Sustainability
• Marty O’Brien, Assistant Director, Campus Services
• Desiree Plata, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

With over 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students studying and researching at MIT—many of whom live in residences here—and over 17,000 faculty and staff in full-time and hybrid positions, it’s safe to say there are a lot of people who might enjoy a meal or three on the MIT campus on any given day.

Whether they’re grabbing favorites from one of our many dining spots or bringing in their own food from somewhere else, all MIT campus eaters have one thing in common: they’re putting their food waste into our system.

In fact, up to 40 percent of MIT’s trash each year is made up of food waste that ends up in landfills—and ultimately, that waste accounts for 30-40 percent of our production of greenhouse gases each year. 

Clearly, this is a problem in need of a distinctly MIT-caliber solution—but that solution would ultimately require a change on multiple levels: both in how we as a community immediately deal with the waste we produce, and how we approach the processing of waste as an institution.

As Brian Goldberg, assistant director r of the Office of Sustainability, says, “We want to find ways for our campus community to contribute to our climate action goals at every level. That means the work we do to mitigate the waste we produce as an institution, through to our impact as departments, right down to our behaviors and choices as individuals.”   

The research-driven response

MIT has committed to the goal of reducing campus trash by 30 percent by 2030. That’s no small number, but by applying all the skills MIT is known for to the challenge—rigorous research, data-driven innovation, and pioneering design thinking—the Institute is working to tackle our waste problems through a series of coordinated actions.

Goldberg calls MIT’s response a cross-campus effort to “design out waste.”

A series of waste audits were conducted in partnership with the Department of Facilities and departments, labs, and centers across campus to take a look at our waste disposal practices and the impact of waste stream contamination on our recycling efforts. An eye-opening project with the MIT Media Lab even took a creative approach to gathering actionable ways to reduce waste.

Goldberg and Marty O’Brien, assistant director for Campus Services, outlined strategies to reduce overall campus waste. Their response to food waste in particular was inspired in part by the research of Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Desiree Plata.

Plata’s research focuses on ways to trap methane gas—including methane gas produced by cows at dairy farms and yes, by the food waste the MIT—and transform it into energy that can be used to power the regional grid. Desiree’s team at the Plata Lab at MIT is continuing to work toward a world in which the “engineered solutions of the future will incorporate environmental objectives.”

Bins have now been placed across the MIT campus to separate out food waste, which can then be reprocessed into fertilizer, compost, and energy—without the off-product of greenhouse gases caused by transporting the waste and putting it into landfills.

The entire MIT community is welcomed to monitor the Institute’s progress towards their waste impact goals in the , Sustainability DataPool which includes the Material Matters, and Campus Water Use dashboards, which you can find here.

To learn more about MIT’s Fast Forward commitments, start here. To learn about MIT’s Campus Climate Action-specific efforts, head here.  

• Adam Schlosser, Joint Program on Science and Policy
• Kerry Emanuel, Professor of Atmospheric Science,  Dept of Earth, Atmospheric, & Planetary Sciences
• Miho Mazereeuw, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture
• Janelle Knox-Hayes, Professor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning
• Franz-Josef Ulm, Faculty Director of MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub and Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Bill Colehower, Senior Advisor to the Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship
• Laura Tenny, Senior Campus Planner, Office of Campus Planning
• Brian Goldberg, Assistant Director, Office of Sustainability
  
   

Heat and flood risks are two of the most critical threats climate change poses to our planet. More specifically, there has been a global year-over-year increase in: 

• flooding from more frequent and high-volume rains;
• flooding from storm surges and rising sea levels; and
• extreme heat events.

The MIT campus and the broader region are increasingly subject to these threats—and that’s where the “Resiliency & Adaptation Roadmap” comes in. This is MIT’s plan for mitigating climate-driven risks, becoming more resilient in the face of climate change, and reducing MIT’s impact as a campus on the community around us, and on our planet. The forthcoming roadmap builds upon nearly a decade of past work.

Creation of the roadmap is led by a team including the Office of Sustainability, Campus Planning, and Campus Services and Stewardship with support from faculty, and engineering and facility staff who know every inch of the campus and how it functions; risk, insurance, and climate science experts who can help us assess what we’re facing; emergency management professionals who can help us with our response; and dedicated students who are individually and collectively driving efforts to foster a more climate-resilient campus.

Resiliency work on campus ensures that every aspect of how we plan, operate, build, and react to challenges makes the least impact on our climate. Like everything else at MIT, meeting the challenge has to begin with data. But how do we gather the data we need?

While catastrophic weather events have been happening for as long as we have records of our weather, the kinds of records kept even a couple of hundred years ago don’t give us enough concrete data to predict what’s coming next with the degree of accuracy we need to make smart decisions for our safety and wellbeing.

Beyond that, there’s a degree of difficulty in gauging local risks—like a once-in-every-100-years catastrophic event—with the most readily available global climate data.

The research-driven response

Fortunately, MIT’s own Miho Mazeereuw is on the case—and not just for MIT, but on behalf of communities worldwide. Mazereeuw heads up the MIT Urban Risk Lab, an interdisciplinary lab that uses design and technology to develop risk-reduction concepts to meet pressing climate challenges. Her work is directly tackling the lack of data needed to address heat risks in particular.

The Urban Risk lab is helping MIT implement “downscaling”, which is the term given to the process of narrowing down data inputs to understand temperature patterns within a smaller area—a process that will help the MIT team quantify and address threats to MIT, and to the communities around MIT.

To this end, the Urban Risk Lab has supported the placement of sensors across the MIT campus and on MIT vehicles, as well as other key placements in the region, to begin mapping patterns in local heat levels—input that will give us a more concrete sense of how our immediate environment is developing.

With more accurate and localized data, MIT can not only plan for more efficient cooling measures that have less impact on the energy grid, we can also develop responses to heat threats that will better serve our community, and best serve the people living and working around us.  

This is just one part of the work that’s going into the Resiliency & Adaptation Roadmap, which you can learn more about here. To learn more about MIT’s Fast Forward commitments, start here. To learn about MIT’s Campus Climate Action-specific efforts, head here. 

• Jorg Scholvin, Associate Director, Fab.nano
• Jim Bagley, Senior Strategic Sourcing Analyst, Office of the Vice President for Finance
   
   

If you’ve ever had that feeling of losing something in the laundry, you might be able to relate to challenges faced in labs at MIT—just on a much bigger scale. MIT.nano, the Institute’s shared-access research facility for nanoscience and nanotechnology, grappled with maintaining its inventory of lab suits as too often the cleanroom apparel (also called bunny suits) weren’t coming back from the cleaners in the same volume sent out, leading to shortages. Instead of succumbing to lost laundry and missing sizes, Fab.nano Associate Director Jorg Scholvin and Senior Strategic Sourcing Analyst Jim Bagley figured out how to efficiently manage the MIT.nano cleanroom bunny suit inventory with an innovative radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging system. Tagging the protective suits with RFIDs has not only been instrumental in reducing loss, but also in understanding what sizes are needed and how usage fluctuates from week to week, which limits the number of new bunny suit purchases each year, reducing campus waste.

Background
Clean room garments are necessary for the lab work that goes on at MIT.nano, so keeping them in stock for users of all sizes is essential. There are various types of these suits on the market, including one-time use disposables, rented suits, or a purchased in-house inventory. While single use suits eliminate the challenges of items lost in the laundry, their environmental impact is much worse than the reuseable counterparts. A lifecycle assessment by Vozzola et al. (2018) compared the sustainability of reusable and disposable cleanroom apparel and found that reusable options significantly outperformed disposable ones in all categories, including process energy, natural resource energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and blue water consumption. The study also demonstrated that a reusable system can reduce solid waste sent from a cleanroom facility to the landfill by 94 to 96 percent. The reusable version of the lab suits has clear environmental advantages over their disposable alternatives—if they can be kept clean and in circulation.

The Approach
Since 2019, MIT.nano has sent out more than 50,000 reusable items to laundry. As with any laundry service, sometimes items go missing—either sorted into the wrong customer’s order or left behind at the facility. With lost items, the cost of replacement or inconvenience of not having a needed size is a concern. As MIT.nano identified ways to reduce loss, they explored the different lab suit options available—single use, rented, or a purchased inventory. Single use suits were quickly eliminated for its environmental impact, and rented options did not solve the issue of cost— temporarily lost or infrequently used items still needed to be paid for through the rental services. Hand-counting incoming and outgoing items was not a practical solution.

MIT.nano decided on the idea of RFID tagging for its owned inventory, aiming to minimize attrition and keep a right-sized inventory—therefore also reducing waste. While RFID tags are low cost and easy to attach solution, commercial RFID readers can be expensive. Responding to this challenge, MIT.nano’s facilities team developed and built their own custom RFID reader. With the system, bunny suits are rapidly scanned in and out at MIT.nano, tracking the suits and minimizing loss.

By implementing an inventory management system using RFID laundry tags and a custom-made reader developed in-house, MIT.nano successfully minimized inefficiencies and enhanced overall facility operations. Compared to disposable bunny suits, which MIT.nano has used intermittently during early start-up of the facility, the in-house inventory and RFID tracking has avoided an estimated two tons of plastic waste.

Sustainability and climate commitments
While this effort focuses on lab wear, it aligns with MIT.nano's overall mission to foster innovation across MIT by providing leading-edge facilities and resources for research, while also contributing to sustainability goals through waste reduction and optimized resource utilization.

Sustainability was a priority in the design and construction of MIT.nano, which received the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Platinum certification for sustainable practices in new construction. “A shared commitment to sustainable principles from the outset made this recognition possible,” said Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology.

Nicholas Menounos, MIT.nano’s Assistant Director of Infrastructure, highlighted the importance of ongoing sustainability efforts within the building’s operations when the facility opened in 2018: “Sustainability isn’t a moment in time, it’s a process. Now that MIT.nano is operational, we will continually try to find ways we can change and optimize how the building operates,” he promised. The RFID-enabled laundry inventory management system is a prime example of this commitment to continual improvement and environmental stewardship. It also aligns with MIT’s commitment to “design out waste” from campus operations. Sustainable procurement practices and reuse, like those demonstrated by MIT.nano are two strategies to help MIT reach its goal of reducing waste from campus by 30 percent from a 2019 baseline.

Results, Reflection and Takeaways
The initial investment in RFID technology and reader development has paid off in substantial cost savings and operational efficiencies. The system has allowed MIT.nano to right-size its inventory, ensuring that the facility maintains an optimal supply of bunny suits in response to increasing facility usage over time. Purchasing and tagging inventory also more seamlessly enables MIT.nano to provide size inclusivity for all user ensuring inventory readily available regardless of size. This adaptive approach to inventory management has not only enhanced operational efficiency but also facilitated better resource utilization within the facility.

Sustainability was a secondary goal of this system which limits waste through a right-sized, reusable inventory. This approach to inventory management can serve as a model for other departments, labs, and centers aiming to limit disposables and balance cost savings and sustainability.