Awards & Recognition

Nominations for the Husky Green Award are now open. In its fifth year, the award recognizes individuals or groups that demonstrate exemplary commitment to sustainability at the UW. Sponsored by the Environmental Stewardship Committee, the award encourages leadership, initiative and dedication. Nominees may be students, faculty, staff, departments or teams at any UW campus.

The nomination submission deadline is March 10, 2014. Winners will be recognized during Earth Day festivities in April.

A soils lab that schedules fieldwork to minimize car trips, reuses sampling containers and recycles soils and leftover plant material has achieved the highest score yet in the University of Washington’s 10-month-old Green Laboratory Certification Program.

With an overall score of 95 percent, Tom DeLuca’s environmental and forest sciences lab has just topped the 93 percent previously earned by a UW Bothell chemistry instructional lab.

The University of Washington is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2014 Green Seed Fund, sponsored by UW Sustainability. The Fund awards money to select projects that advance sustainable research and contribute to campus sustainability goals. The 2014 winning proposals are:

The University of Washington’s sustainability efforts rank in the top 10% of universities worldwide, according to a report by the Universitas Indonesia (UI). The UI Greenmetric report lists the UW as 28th out of the 301 universities from 61 countries that took part in the ranking.

The US Green Building Council recently awarded LEED gold certification to UW Medicine Phase 3.1 in South Lake Union. Green features of the 183,000-square-foot, seven-story building include a storm water cistern for irrigation, a heat-recovery chiller, high-efficiency boilers, exhaust air energy recovery and more. The project was financed through $165 million in tax-exempt bonds via the National Development Council. The building has space for more than 400 researchers in immunology, rheumatology, kidney research, infectious disease treatment and prevention, and vision sciences.

The UW Tower Data Center is one of just 27 data centers in the country to have earned a 2013 ENERGY STAR Certification from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This recognizes reduced power consumption, lowered carbon footprint, and slower growth of future power needs. The Tower Data Center, operated by UW-IT, provides managed space, power and cooling of critical infrastructure supporting IT departments campus-wide. The UW is one of only two universities in the country to have ever received this certification.

The University of Washington’s sustainability leadership was recognized Tuesday evening at the fifth annual Green Washington Awards, hosted by Seattle Magazine. The event celebrated 50 organizations in Washington state demonstrating leadership and commitment to sustainable business practices.

BizCycle isn’t just for your typical business. We adapt the BizCycle credit list is adaptable to fit workplaces of all kinds, even one of the state’s top employers—the University of Washington.

The UW Seattle campus has the challenge of promoting and supporting bicycling for faculty, staff and students—over 68,000 people! But the campus’s size and span has not stopped the University from being a national leader in bicycling.

The University of Washington has again been named to the Princeton Review’s Green Honor Roll, receiving a perfect score for the 2012-13 academic year. This marks the fifth year the UW has achieved this distinction.

The Princeton Review—known for its education services helping students choose and get into colleges—annually measures the sustainability of higher education institutions. This “Green Rating” includes environmentally-related practices, policies and academic offerings.

The notion of keystone species, the loss of which can reverberate throughout the food web, is a concept taken for granted today but was unheard of when University of Washington biologist Robert Paine pioneered it in the 1960s.