Connie and Kevin Chou Hall Zero Waste Certification
Project Sponsor: Haas School of Business
TGIF Grant: $43,050
Project Theme: Waste Diversion and Reduction
Project Description: In 2017, Haas unveiled its newest building, the Connie & Kevin Chou Hall, an 80,000 square foot, state-of-the-art facility dedicated to student learning. The building embodies Haas’s defining principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. Designed for LEED Platinum and WELL certifications, Connie & Kevin Chou Hall will also be the first business school building registered to attain Zero Waste certification by Summer 2018. The building will serve as a model for environmental sustainability at UC Berkeley and represents a critical step toward the University of California’s Zero Waste by 2020 and Carbon Neutrality by 2025 goals. The Zero Waste Certification project is be led by a multidisciplinary team of graduate and undergraduate students working closely with Cal Zero Waste, facilities management, and building vendors to ensure that building operations are designed for successful waste diversion. They will educate students, faculty, and staff on the importance of the initiative and how to fully utilize the space while achieving zero-waste. The building will have no landfill bins and a “pack-in, pack-out” mentality will be cultivated among users: any waste brought in will need to be brought out and disposed of by the user. Instilling this mentality can have broad reaching impacts beyond the Berkeley campus. As the project proceeds, an in-depth best practices manual will be developed to help scale the initiative throughout the UC campus system.
Project Goals:
- Achieve zero-waste certification from the U.S. Green Building Council for Chou Hall
- Educate the campus community on the importance of minimizing waste
- Create a model for zero-waste that can be applied to other buildings in support of Cal’s pursuit of zerowaste by 2020