When Danika Ford learned about the environmental impacts of fast fashion in high school, she started looking for college programs combining traditional environmental science with social science to understand how human motivations, behaviors, and policies affect environmental problems and solutions.
One of the most beautiful things about college is all of the different paths that people have taken to get here. No matter how you ended up at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, there is a common goal among most people here: to graduate with a degree in something they are passionate about. Olivia Messerges, who transferred to Illinois as a Junior after completing a year of community college in her hometown, did exactly that.
In the agricultural and food industry, determining the chemical composition of raw materials is important for production efficiency, application, and price. Traditional laboratory testing is time-consuming, complicated, and expensive.
Researchers analyzed meteorological data from nine Upper Midwest states from 1979-2021, tracking trends in extreme heat and cold over every 4-kilometer square of that territory. They found striking regional differences in the extremes. Many parts of the Upper Midwest experienced significant upticks in the number of extreme heat days over the 40 years — an increasing trend — while others saw a rise in extreme cold events. Some communities experienced more of both extremes. Others appeared to be more resistant to changes in extreme heat or cold.
As the world faces the challenges of mitigating climate change and providing resources for a growing population, there is increasing focus on developing circular economies for sustainable production. But to evaluate strategies and impacts, it is necessary to have reliable metrics.
Elephant conservation is a major priority in southern Africa, but habitat loss and urbanization mean the far-ranging pachyderms are increasingly restricted to protected areas like game reserves. The risk? Contained populations could become genetically isolated over time, making elephants more vulnerable to disease and environmental change.
Nanozymes are tiny, engineered substances that mimic the catalytic properties of natural enzymes, and they serve a variety of purposes in biomedicine, chemical engineering, and environmental applications. They are typically made from inorganic materials, including metal-based elements, which makes them unsuitable for many purposes due to their toxicity and high production costs.
Researchers analyzed the financial and environmental costs and benefits of four biofuels crops used to produce sustainable aviation fuels in the U.S. They found that each feedstock — corn stover, energy sorghum, miscanthus or switchgrass — performed best in a specific region of the rainfed United States. Their study will help growers and policymakers select the feedstocks most suited to meeting goals like reducing production costs, lowering greenhouse gas emissions and building soil carbon stocks.
Creating fertilizers from organic waste can help reduce the consumption of fossil fuels and promote sustainable production. One way of doing this is through hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL), which converts biomass into biocrude oil through a high-temperature, high-pressure process.
Illinois has made transitioning to clean energy a major priority in recent years with the passage of the Future Energy Jobs Act (FEJA) in 2016 and the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA) in 2021. Both pieces of legislation prioritize an equitable transition, aiming to avoid and address historical wrongdoings associated with environmental injustice.