Sustainability

If you ate, filled your gas tank, took medicine, or did laundry today, you likely participated in the bioeconomy. That’s the part of the economy that taps as its source material living, growing things.

In collaboration with other Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs), researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) are developing industrially feasible techniques for second-generation biofuel production from oilcane, an oil-rich variety of sugarcane, to help meet our growing societal demand for fuels.

The Sustainable Student Farm (SSF) is a cornerstone of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences

If you peek into a Turner Hall classroom at the end of the semester, you might see something unusual.

A nine-year study comparing a typical two-year corn and soybean rotation with a more intensive three-year rotation involving corn, cereal rye, soybean and winter wheat found that the three-year system can dramatically reduce nitrogen — an important crop nutrient — in farm runoff without compromising yield.

The new findings are detailed in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.

Pomelo is a large citrus fruit commonly grown in Southeast and East Asia. It has a very thick peel, which is typically discarded, resulting in a considerable amount of food waste.

The U.S.

What if farmers could not only prevent excess phosphorus from polluting downstream waterways, but also recycle that nutrient as a slow-release fertilizer, all without spending a lot of money? In a first-of-its-kind field study, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers show it’s possible and economical. 

Conventional food and agricultural production systems employ a linear “take, make, waste” approach: taking natural resources from the Earth to make food and fuel, generating waste that contaminates the soil and water, and emitting harmful pollutants.