Cornell has established best practices to minimize any potential negative impact and ensure the sustainability of essential resources. Management programs steer, model, and monitor the effect of university activities on water and air quality. This page provides information on the programs currently in place for water quality and air quality, and describes new initiatives.

Cornell Contract Requirements
As a part of all construction projects at Cornell, contractors must adhere to regulations established by the University for environmental protection. These policies are maintained and updated by the Environmental Compliance Office (ECO).

Water
Cornell’s Ithaca central campus is located between Fall Creek and Cascadilla Creek gorges, in the Cayuga Lake watershed.

Greenhouse Best Management Practices
With many research greenhouses on campus, Cornell’s college of Agriculture and Life Sciences decided to establish a list of best practices to achieve environmentally optimum management of water, nutrients and pest control materials in Cornell greenhouses.

Construction Site Stormwater Management Program
Establishing a management program for construction sites on campus to effectively manage stormwater discharge has been an important part of mitigating the potential erosion and contamination that can occur.

Stream ecological health
Working with student classes and also consultants, Cornell monitors the ecological health of Fall Creek, Cascadilla Creek and smaller tributaries near the Ithaca/Tompkins Airport by assessing the biodiversity and representative species of macro-invertabrates (aquatic insects and bugs) living in the streams.

Clean-up of former waste disposal sites to prevent groundwater contamination
Before the first Earth Day in 1970, and the subsequent raising of environmental consciousness and regulations, burying waste in unlined trenches in the ground was generally accepted and standard practice. Unfortunately, Cornell University buried both research wastes and conventional trash in the ground during part of the 20th century. Cornell has taken the initiative to identify and remediate the sites where this was done. The most notable clean-up underway is at the former Radiation and Chemical Disposal Sites, located north of the Ithaca/Tompkins Airport.

Air
Understanding the way campus activities impact the air quality around us is an important part of developing sustainable practices. These programs address both indoor and outdoor environment.

Indoor Environmental Quality
Concern for the environment we live in is not exclusively for the natural world outdoor. This program in Environmental Health and Safety hopes to provide and maintain a healthy learning and working environment for students, faculty, staff and visitors inside all campus facilities.

Air Modeling
With a variety of research labs and other sources of air emissions around campus Cornell uses air dispersion modeling to ensure the safety of both people and the environment.

Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine (CCVM): Replacing an incinerator with a "non-burn" technology
Final design has begun on a waste management facility for the treatment and destruction of pathological waste (i.e., animal carcasses and bedding) and conventional medical waste (i.e., plastics used in research and patient care). The new facility will replace an existing pathological waste incinerator and a system that ships conventional medical waste to an off-site commercial treatment facility. The new facility will eliminate the air emissions from the current incinerator , which destroys 750,000 pounds of carcass waste per year. The new technology was chosen by representatives of Cornell and the local community through a two year collaborative shared decision-making process.

Utilities Department (leaving ECO web)
The Ithaca Campus has central systems for the production and distribution of heat, electricity and chilled water. The Central Heating Plant is a combined heat and power plant that uses coal, natural gas and #6 fuel oil as fuels. Because of the combined cogeneration of steam heat and electricity, the electric production is very efficient - over twice as efficient as a convention electric power plant. For pollution control, the natural gas/oil boilers have state-of-the-art low NOx burners and burn low nitrogen fuel. The coal boilers burn low sulfur fuel and have baghouses to remove the flyash from the stack emissions. Coal is used because it is less than half the price of gas or oil for an equivalent amount of energy.