The University of Georgia is widely celebrated for its scenic beauty, but there is one UGA space that is unique. Located in the middle of campus, it’s a peaceful, quiet plot of green that for nearly seven decades has enjoyed a privileged view of the university growing around it.
The green roof atop UGA’s Geography-Geology Building, or “the GG Building,” as it’s known on campus, was constructed with the building itself in 1960. Ever since, the GG Green Roof has hosted a wide range of research representing equally diverse disciplines, but one thread connects the projects of today with those envisioned when it was built: sustainability.
In fact, the GG Green Roof is only one example of UGA sustainability-related research conducted in the living laboratory of Athens. It’s not just that UGA faculty and students are trying to make the Earth a more livable place; it’s how the idea of sustainability is suffused throughout how they do it. From climate research and food systems to waste reduction, textile recycling and a host of other topics, UGA faculty and student investigators are living the idea of “reduce, reuse, recycle” to make a more sustainable future for us all.
Raising the (green) roof
In the early 2000s, about 10 years after Tom Mote arrived as a young faculty member in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, some of his graduate students wanted to grow watermelons. Problem was, they lived in apartments and could not have gardens at home.
No problem, Mote told them. Why not use the roof of the GG Building?
“I’m quite sure we had the only rooftop-grown, air conditioner condensate-watered watermelons in the state of Georgia,” recalled Mote, now a Distinguished Research Professor in geography.
Horticulture—whether for personal or research purposes—is one of the primary activities atop the GG Building. Mote’s watermelon growers were part of a long line of students since the mid-1990s who have maintained the green roof’s raised beds, which today are managed jointly by the Office of Sustainability, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Department of Horticulture, and Franklin College.
In this video, Professor Amy Trauger gives an introduction to the Geography-Geology Building Green Roof. (Video courtesy of Knox Gaines and the Department of Geography)
According to Mote, the roof originally was conceived as a research tool for the Department of Geography. In addition to its vegetation area, it features a small interior lab space akin to the conning tower of a ship that can house workstations and other equipment. Since the GG Building’s construction, the rooftop’s research utility has been continually re-imagined in a cycle that repeated itself over decades: A new use for the roof would be identified, then over time technology and research priorities would change, and use of the roof would again decline until a new utility arose.
For example, Mote’s own research is in atmospheric science. He used to have two different satellite receiving stations on the roof, each collecting real-time data feeds from the National Weather Service and other sources.
“Having the lab space up here allows you to set up equipment and have the receiver right outside, and that’s much more convenient than trying to install something on a roof and then find a facility somewhere else in the building, run all the wiring, etc.,” Mote said. “But now we can get these same feeds across the internet, so we no longer need to maintain the satellite receiving station.”
But infrastructure itself can be recycled. UGA’s Small Satellite Research Laboratory now uses some of Mote’s old mounting hardware for a satellite dish that serves its Center for Orbital Satellite Mission Operations. SSRL is part of a network of small satellite operators in North America and Europe that collectively share data from and about their orbiting hardware. UGA’s data happens to arrive via that dish atop the GG Building.
Nowadays Mote said he mostly uses the roof as a testing ground for new equipment before it’s deployed at an actual research location, and his graduate students use the lab as a research space with a great view to get their work done. Other geography faculty, including Marshall Shepherd, Andrew Grundstein, and Deepak Mishra, also have used the roof for various projects such as ongoing research into urban heat islands.
But, over the last 20 years, the GG Green Roof’s most consistent use has been horticultural. When geography Professor Amy Trauger taught a course in the mid-2000s on urban food systems, she had her students use the roof’s existing raised beds to grow produce that was sent to local nonprofits. That led her to partner with the Office of Sustainability to refresh the beds, adding new topsoil and adding new plantings.
“That weedy, grassy rooftop has over time been converted into an urban agriculture classroom, where we’re growing seasonal produce and perennial pollinator plants, teaching people urban agriculture, and distributing that food to the local community,” said Kevin Kirsche, director of the Office of Sustainability.
Kirsche’s office now partners with UGArden to deliver a roof-grown harvest to local food kitchens; for the past two years, fourth-year ecology major Amelia Shugart has led a corps of student volunteers tending the roof. Over the last decade, some 1,200 Green Roof volunteers have helped distribute 1,100 pounds of fresh produce to the Athens Clarke County community.
“Between the urban food activity and the Office of Sustainability and the Small Satellite Research Lab and the geography uses,” Mote said, “the Green Roof has probably had the most intensive interdisciplinary research use of just about any space on campus.”
Growing food sustainability at UGArden
When it comes to food sustainability, UGArden has been leading the way since its creation in 2010. Situated on a quiet plot of land a few miles off the main campus, UGArden is a fully functioning farm worked almost entirely by student workers, interns, and volunteers. It represents a vital experiential learning tool for students to learn about small-scale agriculture that incorporates organic principles and practices.
Each year it produces thousands of pounds of fresh produce, the large majority of which is distributed to area residents facing food insecurity. And, while not primarily a research operation, the farm presents a variety of research opportunities.
“We have had several research projects happen on the farm over the 15 years UGArden has been around,” said Ty Brooks, farm director and one of only two full-time UGArden employees. “Our main mission is pretty simple: to build a community around sustainable food systems.”
UGArden provides a convenient test bed for agricultural researchers. Jennifer Jo Thompson, senior research scientist in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences investigators, is part of a national effort to revive heirloom varieties of collard greens, whose genetic diversity—like that of many staple crops—has taken a hit in the age of large-scale industrial farming.
As part of the project, UGArden dedicated a few planting rows to heirloom collards and helped produce an eventual “Ultracross Collards” population that displays greater genetic diversity and can be selected for increased tolerance to extreme weather and pests (not to mention for better taste).
But the farm also presents other research opportunities that indirectly support its sustainability mission. For example, while UGArden receives some funding from the university, it still needs to raise about two-thirds of its annual operating budget.
To make ends meet, the farm markets and sells varieties of medicinal herbs and herbal teas grown and processed on site. But processing those teas—picking the plants, removing the leaves from the stems, bagging the teas—is an intensely manual process. Engineering undergraduates Cooper Gross and Timothy Novajosky looked at that process and saw opportunity.
For their senior capstone project, Gross and Novajosky, as well as fellow engineering students Zane Caudill and David Slate, were part of a team that designed and fabricated an “herb separator” to help automate this painstaking process. After developing an effective proof of concept this spring built from wood and 3D-printed plastic, the team built a second-generation prototype with sturdier (and food-safe) components.
“One of the reasons I picked this project was [it involved] building our own device from start to finish,” Gross said. “We’re not just designing a theoretical idea or a small part of something. This was our complete, owned machine.”
Proving that necessity is indeed the mother of invention, Brooks said other students have come up with ingenious ways to meet the farm’s needs. For instance, one UGArden crop is head lettuce, which volunteers must wash after harvest before it can be delivered to food banks.
To meet this need, UGArden staff and interns took a washing machine, removed the agitator, and now use it as a giant salad spinner.
“But it doesn’t have a braking mechanism,” Brooks said with a smile. “So after you start it, it’s just spinning. We’re always having to remind people, ‘Don’t put your hand on that! You’ve got to let it spin down on its own.’”
Putting trash away—for good
One group in the College of Engineering would look on this jury-rigged technology with approval. The Circularity Informatics Lab, led by Regents’ and UGA Athletic Association Professor Jenna Jambeck, works to mitigate the global problem of plastics pollution by working with local communities to institute more circular economies and shift from waste management to “resource management.”
“At its core, circularity is about eliminating the existence of waste in the first place,” said Taylor Maddalene Myers, a research faculty member in engineering and director of the lab’s Circularity Assessment Protocol, or CAP. “In a perfectly circular system, everything that has an output from the system has an input back into it.
“In our economy and society today, waste is sort of out-of-sight, out-of-mind,” she said. “Once it’s in a bin, it’s no longer valuable. It goes to this magical place we call ‘away.’ A lot of what we try to do is make people understand there really is no ‘away.’”
CAP is a comprehensive tool that provides a snapshot of a community’s resource use and helps identify opportunities to optimize circularity and reduce waste leakage. By capturing ground-level data—what kinds of products are sold in the community, whether alternative materials and service delivery models exist, how waste is collected and diverted, and other factors—the CAP team provides local decision-makers with information to help them make more sustainable choices for their communities. To date, Jambeck’s lab has conducted a CAP in more than 60 cities in 16 countries, including several in Georgia (and is working on one specific to UGA).
The CAP assessment in UGA’s hometown led the Athens-Clarke County Solid Waste Department to work with the New Materials Institute in conducting a curbside composting pilot program, supported by the Walmart Foundation, in the Normaltown/Boulevard neighborhood. Some 400 homes participated over three months, resulting in the collection of more than 19 tons of food scraps and other organic waste.
In this video, UGA Athletic Association Professor Jenna Jambeck talks about her lab’s work to promote more circular economies in local communities worldwide. (Video courtesy of the Circularity Informatics Lab)
Students contributed to the Athens CAP by tracking single-use plastics in restaurants and other businesses, the amount of plastic packaging in consumer products, and the amount and type of plastic litter on campus and around town. To log what they found, students used the Debris Tracker app developed in 2010 by Jambeck in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“I spent a lot of time squeezing toothpaste out of tubes and then measuring how much product was actually inside compared to how much plastic packaging,” said Deborah Madden, a senior environmental engineering major who’s worked in Jambeck’s lab since she was a first-year student. “We were able to show there were essentially food deserts in lower-income areas that forced people to go to dollar stores, which had goods with a higher plastic-to-product ratio.”
Worn, torn, reborn
Sha’Mira Covington knows all about circularity. An assistant professor of fashion in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, Covington studies methods for infusing sustainable consumerism into fashion merchandising. Is it possible, Covington wonders, to implement a circular economy—at least one involving clothing and textiles—in a small community like a university?
As part of her research, three years ago she worked with Ph.D. student Mozhgan Soltanisehat to implement a textile recycling program on campus. The effort now involves 15 FACS students and multiple collection bins placed in buildings around campus. Since 2023, the project has collected about 500 pounds of materials, which they work to upcycle or recycle depending on the item and its components.
Upcycling clothing involves changing a garment into a different type of garment—cutting off the sleeves, adding embellishments, etc. Recycling clothing involves turning the garment into something completely different, and that can be a significant challenge based on the materials used.
“You can’t separate the materials,” Covington said. “If you’ve got a cotton-poly blend, it stays a cotton-poly blend. The cotton and the polyester are woven together. Usually textile recycling on industrial scale produces material for insulation, for carpets. We’re hoping we can turn textiles we collect on campus into an end-use product that can be seen and touched and enjoyed.”
Would Bulldog Nation be in the market for recycled-fiber stadium seat cushions or branded blankets? That’s a question Covington hopes to answer, perhaps using FACS equipment like textile shredders, spinners, and weavers to make the products. Like UGArden, FACS also provides an opportunity for experiential learning in entrepreneurship through Couture A La Cart, a pop-up boutique directed by senior lecturer Claire McClure and run by students and that sells jewelry, clothing, and other accessories.
The Swap Shop, a free exchange store (donations accepted) located in the Miller Learning Center, also contributes to this experiment. Operated by the Office of Sustainability in space donated by University Libraries, the shop accepts donations of clothing and many other items. When it receives donations of clothing it can’t use, it often redirects the materials to Covington.
The Swap Shop itself was launched through an Office of Sustainability Campus Sustainability Grant (as was Gross and Novajosky’s herb separator project). In fact, Kirsche said his office—and specifically its student interns—support each program mentioned in this article and continue to catalyze new sustainability research on campus.
“UGArden and our office grew up together,” Kirsche said. “It’s been a collaborative connection for years now.
“The concepts of sustainability and circularity are embedded into student programming and operational practices all across campus, fueled by research and data-driven decision-making,” he continued. “It’s been a thrill to see such a wide range of innovative ideas take root and flourish.”