By SHANNON O. WELLS
In terms of Pitt Sustainability-related projects and events, the month of June can be a mixed blessing: While nature is in full bloom around and beyond campus — and weather can be great — many students, faculty and staff have taken flight, at least temporarily, at the end of the just-concluded academic year.
For whatever reasons, this hasn’t proved a problem in the late spring and early summer of 2024, said Emily Potoczny, engagement manager in the Office of Sustainability. That includes Pollinator Month 2024, which featured several events and workshops highlighting the importance of bees and other insects, and reptiles and mammals that contribute to pollination throughout the year.
“It’s been awesome,” she said. “June, it’s usually a month that folks are taking a bit of a breath after the year, and so we expect engagement to be a little bit lighter, but it’s actually been really great. Everything’s been well attended, especially the workshops that the Center for Creativity put on throughout the month. Those always draw a great crowd: a mix of students, undergrads and grads, staff, community members. … They put together such a great variety of programming.”
Other Pollinator Month events included Sustainable Landscapes and the innovative ways Pitt’s campus is landscaped and maintained; planting in the Pitt Plant 2 Plate Garden; creating DIY nature journals; a Bee-Licious Pollinator Tour; a Matrix Gardening Lunch & Learn; and a Pollinator Plant Giveaway on June 24 at the William Pitt Union lawn based on pollinator-friendly plants grown by Greg Null, co-chair of the Sustainability Advisory Committee and assistant director for assessment and accreditation in the School of Medicine. A member of the Pollinator Habitat Advisory Committee, Null has taught workshops on native rain garden design, construction and maintenance.
“It was butterfly weed and shrubby St. John’s Wort giveaways, (about) 60 of them that grew from seed from native butterfly weed in his own backyard,” Potoczny said of Null. “That was really great. We had, like, 100 folks come through that we talked to. Everything else has been pretty well attended, even despite the heat last week.”
One morning pollinator tour was hampered by a rain deluge, Potoczny admitted, while adding that the wetness was compensated by the quantity and beauty of blooms around campus.
“It is really interesting to even see the changes from last week to this week and the Bigelow Bioswales and the pollinator gardens that are over there,” she noted. “Last week when we were walking through, it was pretty much just the cone flowers that were starting up and not too much else was blooming, but this week, as we were handing out the plants yesterday, it was all the black-eyed Susans. They’re just alive and so well.”
Another pollinator event on June 20 focused on the University Library System’s Archives and Special Collections to explore the work of Andrey Avinoff, an internationally known artist, lepidopterist and professor who served as the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History from 1926 to 1945.
“He is a prolific sketcher and entomologist and all this kind of stuff,” Potoczny said. “So we got to dive into the archives a little bit, which was really cool, and then do our own butterfly art out of like scrap materials, things like that. It was a nice afternoon.”
As another successful Pollinator Month wraps up this week, there are plenty more sustainability-oriented events coming up to help this summer be educational as well as enjoyable.
These include OpenStreetsPGH on June 29; Confident City Cycling Classes on July 9; the Pitt Bike Cave Fun ride on July 16; and Famers Market at Pitt on July 24. For a full list, check out the Sustainability Calendar.
Faculty-and-staff-based events include the second-annual Green Suite Celebration on July 10. “We’re already pretty much at capacity in terms of attendees,” Potoczny said, “but I’m really looking forward to our community of folks involved in offices and green offices and green labs, which is over 800 people now, up from (around) 600 last year, which I’m pretty excited about.”
In addition to an opportunity to socialize and connect with others who care about sustainability on campus, the event is about “trying to push their own departments and units and offices to take the next step, and focusing on what that means for the group as a collective whole,” she said. “If you have more than 800 people that are making those efforts in their own departments, then what can we do next?”
Green lab initiatives
One new key sustainability initiative is the Polycarbin Pipette Tip Box Recycling pilot, which was created to help campus labs reduce landfill waste and single-stream recycling contamination caused by improperly “wish-cycling” lab items.
Based on an estimate that the scientific community creates 12 billion pounds of plastic waste annually, Pitt, as a leader in both scientific research and sustainability, is therefore in a unique position to effectively reduce research’s impact on the environment, Potoczny noted.
“Those that I’ve talked to in green labs are well aware of that statistic. They live it and feel it every day,” she said. “The pipette tip box recycling pilot that we rolled out (in May) is our first stab at trying to figure out a way to minimize lab plastics through diversion.”
By participating in the recycling pilot, labs can reduce their environmental impact and help Pitt achieve its goal of 25 percent landfill waste reduction by 2030.
The program is only for pipette tip boxes, the casings that the wafers and pipette tips come inside. “That’s a really large volume of material that we could try and divert from the landfill,” Potoczny said, adding that some labs still mistakenly send those boxes to single-stream recycling where they don’t belong. “Only plastic bottles should be going in there.”
The program originated from former School of Medicine students, “which is really cool,” Potoczny noted. “We’re going with this high-volume item to see how much space it can save in landfill dumpsters and see if it’s then a valuable program to continue for the University if we can adjust some of those landfill rates.”
The program takes used lab plastics and turns them back into new ones, “so it’s circular in that sense,” she said, as opposed to specialty item programs that downcycle materials that will be at their end of life, such as decking boards and park benches, “which is still a better use than them going to the landfill, for sure. But we really love that it is a complete circular system there.”
Another pilot program from the Sustainable Labs Committee, led by Samantha Chan, assistant director of sustainability, is Pitt Green Lab Sample Boxes. The sample box, which is made of 100 percent recycled cardboard, contains 20 sample items from Fisher Scientific’s Greener Choice products, all of which are either made of recycled content, biodegradable, or designed for reuse.
“We are trying to promote the purchase of those products in addition to starting up the recycling program, so we try to match things up there,” she said.
In other sustainability news:
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Pitt has been green recertified by meeting groundskeeping practice guidelines around the use of fertilizers and pesticides, “what we mow and don’t mow those kinds of things” and also by having six pollinator-friendly habitat-designated spaces on campus.
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Several bee houses have been installed around campus, which are managed by the grounds crew as well as the newly formed Pitt Conservation student club, which Potoczny said emerged to improve continuity in the student support of green projects, including the plant-to-play garden, pollinator-friendly planting, and Bee Campus certification.
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Pitt grounds crews work with 99 percent electric, as opposed to gasoline-fueled, groundskeeping equipment, such as trimmers and leaf blowers, “and all that kind of stuff that’s nice and quiet and don’t contribute to air pollution on the days that they run them,” she said. “This time of year, we start to see some of those days where we’re getting orange and red (bad) air-quality days, so it’s nice that that’s not something that will be contributed to on those days.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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