Best Practices

This page shows an overview of a couple of best practices that students and staff developed over the past year(s). A project or activity turns into a best practice when links between education, research, and operations are optimally used and people and resources interact at every level.

For an Innovation Space Project, a team of 4 students teamed up with our Sustainability Ambassador, Facility Management Services and our caterer Appèl to come up with a solution to nudge people to make a sustainable choice in the canteens at the TU/e.

The problem:
As climate change is coming closer to our own doorstep, we have realized that we need to do something about emissions in every industry. The food industry accounts for 37% of the global CO2 emission. However, people don’t want to be told what to do and how to behave, they want to make these choices for themselves. Our system changes the decision-making process for customers and caterers and makes the sustainable choice the easiest choice.

The solution:
The team came up with an idea for Food Labels that provides the necessary information to make the right choices, the social hero and the environmental fighter.

The social hero shows how well a product does when it comes to vitality, social responsibility and local harvest, while the environmental fighter considers emissions, water and organic production, and each product would get a score based on these topics. With our labels, it has been proven that 20% of the customers consciously goes for a low emission product.

This project consists of a scientifically approved method, being part of an educational assignment (as part of an existing course) which is tested in real life on campus. A perfect example of how Research, Education and Operational Management can work together to make the world a better place and reach goals as stated in the TU/e’s Sustainability Vision for Operational Management.

See this article in Cursor for more information: https://www.cursor.tue.nl/en/news/2021/december/week-2/how-sustainable-is-your-sandwich/

WHAT'S NEXT?
The test results were positive and asked for a follow up. What happened next is that a formal Student Team is formed around this subject, where the aim will be to improve the labelling system and implement it at all canteens at the TU/e and later create a possible industry standard, including a business model around the labels.

In 2019 our new, super sustainable, Atlas Building was opened, the main building of the TU/e campus where the Service Departments, the Board and some faculties are seated. On the ground floor in the main hall of this building, a room was dedicated to the GO Green Office (GGO). Instead of making this the standard meeting room of the GGO, the GGO decided that this room, in this really prominent location in the main building of our university, needed to be the sustainability hub, later called the Green Room, of the TU/e.

Purpose
The purpose of the Green Room is twofold:

1. For the short term it was necessary to have a physical space for the Green Room to represent the TU/e when it comes to sustainability, innovation and technology.
2. Sustainability is one of the major challenges for the future, as described in the Strategy 2030, and a lot of students, researchers and employees of the TU/e are working hard to make the world a more sustainable place in the future. The Green Room is  a physical and online place to connect the sustainability community so they can interact, connect and learn from each other. The Sustainability Hub will have a key role in connecting the sustainability community at the TU/e, as it will be used as a meeting place and as a place where you can exhibit what you work on.

What we created at the opening in 2021 is exactly what we envisioned, a place that connects research, education and the services on sustainability matters, a place where people meet and connect, where brainstorms are being held and a place that inspires and where people can freely wander in if it’s not in use.

Exhibitions
We’ve had two different professionally organized exhibitions:

• The first exhibition was on the SDG’s and how the TU/e helps to achieve those goals.
• The second exhibition was a collaboration with EIRES (research), GO Green Office and ELC, on how the TU/e helps to enable the transition from natural gas.

Other activities
We organized Movie Nights, we use it as our meeting room, etc. Thanks to this room, several people met and teamed up and organized other events like the (digital, thanks to corona) meetup with Milieudefensie, the COP26 Event (also online thanks to corona).

This business case describes the need, cost and benefits for a central TU/e Living Labs platform to collect data from and use of (IoT) sensors (in our Living Labs).

A number of student teams are directly involved in the CO2 reduction on our campus, especially Team Red offers concrete solutions. They have a working product with which TU/e ​​can calculate possible CO2 saving measures in real time.

How do you improve the health and well-being of employees while reducing energy consumption at the same time? With DYNKA we focus on both aspects. The DYNKA research is part of a collaborative project between Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), Maastricht University (UM), Huygen Installatie Adviseurs, Hogeschool Zuyd, Almende, Signify, Knowledge Institute ISSO and Kropman Installatietechniek. The research is being conducted by researchers from TU/e ​​and UM. The project is financed by TKI Urban Energy of the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

To what extent the right combination of LED light and temperature can reduce energy consumption in the field of heating or cooling, is being investigated. The influence of this on the perception of health (alertness, sleep-wake rhythm, comfort, metabolism, temperature & perception) among employees is also examined.

The vitality core team started drawing up the Vital Campus plan during the vitality week (19 - 23 November 2018). During this week, a diverse mix of more than 100 stakeholders came together for a healthy breakfast brainstorming session to provide input and create a project plan to become one of the healthiest campuses in the world.

Why? Enabling and encouraging students and staff to follow healthy lifestyles creates a vibrant campus culture of compassion, well-being, equality and social engagement.

Read the annual report of 2018 – 2019 about everything the Vitaly Core team has done