Six Week Intro to Sustainability - Taught by SGD Students

Graduate students in Pitt's Sustainability and Green Design (SGD) group, along with members of the student organization Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW), organized and taught a 6-week introductory course on sustainability. The course, offered through the Junior Urban Leadership Institute (JuLI) at the Kingsley Association in Larimer, PA, offers high-school aged students an after-school, 2 hour-a-week exposure to sustainable practices and ideas.

JuLI students track the energy

efficiencies of various electricity-

generating sources.

Throughout the course, students were exposed to the triple bottom line approach to sustainability, and asked to incorporate economics, environment, and social equity thinking into problem solving for their communities.

JuLI students build spaghetti

towers as they learn about engineering design principles.

Students learned about healthy eating, material and energy flows, water and waste treatment, and engineering design principles.

Greening the Greenhouse: Fresh in the Fall

As the school year starts back up, so does SGD's partnership with Shaler Area High School. Shaler's greenhouse (pictured above) was erected over the summer and is ready for its green add-ons, provided with help from an MCSI Community Grant.


With all the materials ready, Shaler High School students and SGD graduate students spent a half day assembling all the components and laying out the site.

New additions to the greenhouse include:

• Solar Panels
• Small Wind Turbine
• 2 Compost Bins
• A Rain Barrel

And will hopefully provide Shaler Students with year-round, hands-on sustainable learning.

Shaler students assemble the wind turbine.

Shaler students with the assembled solar panels.










SGD and Shaler students assemble a compost bin. Two bins were purchased for the project- a large, manual bin, and a smaller tumbler bin.













As can be seen in the photos, work is not yet completed, so expect more updates as the semester continues!