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Resources Management

  1. Sustainability
  2. Resources Management

Water

  • Egypt is in a constant state of water scarcity, and the projected population growth will only put further stress on the fixed water output of the Nile River.
  • Sustainable water management is one of the country's most important environmental issues.
  • At AUC, the Office of Sustainability established the Energy and Resource Conservation and Efficiency (ERCE) Task Force in 2012. The ERCE task force, comprised of staff and faculty, created a multi-part plan to study the University’s water needs and develop recommendations for increasing the available water supply while simultaneously reducing demand.
  • The Office of Sustainability and the Office of Facilities and Operations collect and analyze monthly data about on-campus water consumption, divided into three categories: air conditioning cooling towers, landscaping irrigation, and building use. This data is discussed within the ERCE to pilot or initiate new ideas to responsibly manage and reduce water consumption on-campus and its corresponding CO2 emissions.

Energy

  • Given that the New Cairo Campus is located in a desert climate where air conditioning is needed for more than half the year, the vast majority of CO2 emissions result from the consumption of energy for the HVAC system. Not to mention, equipment such as office desktop computers, printers, scanners, and lighting consume large quantities of energy given the campus is heavily populated during the Academic Year.
  • At AUC, the Office of Sustainability established the Energy and Resource Conservation and Efficiency (ERCE) Task Force in 2012. The ERCE energy task force, which is headed by the Office of Sustainability and comprised of staff and faculty, is responsible for various initiatives to reduce energy consumption and subsequent CO2 emissions.
  • These initiatives include improving the management of the HVAC system and chilled and hot water production, as well as reducing lighting consumption. Data about AUC's energy consumption at both the AUC New Cairo and AUC Tahrir Square campuses are collected daily to monitor and track the University’s consumption pattern. Currently, the Office of Sustainability is looking into multiple options regarding the increase of renewable energy sources to meet AUC’s energy demands.

Waste

  • AUC is actively developing a more sustainable trash management system to reduce the overall waste generated on campus. To aid this effort, the Clean and Green Committee was established. The Committee consists of faculty, staff, and maintenance personnel, and is co-chaired by Dina Rateb, Associate Professor in the Department of Management, and Yasmin Mansour Sustainability Director
  • The Office of Sustainability has constructed an on-campus compacting station to compress the separated plastic, cans, and paper. Once these valuable materials are compressed, the sorted trash weights at the New Cairo Campus are calculated each day. AUC sells the compacted sorted and weighted trash to commercial recyclers and uses the profits to fund sustainability-related projects. Presently, AUC donates most of the used paper to a recycling NGO and the rest to the Zabaleen, the trash-collecting community in Cairo.
  • To reduce plastic water bottle usage on campus, the Office of Sustainability has installed chilled water dispensers for students, faculty, and staff to use reusable bottles. The Office plans to add more chilled water dispensers in high-traffic areas of campus to decrease AUC's solid waste emissions. 
Map of AUC Drinking Fountains

Map of current water dispensers on campus

  • In February 2013, the Clean and Green Committee launched a recycling program that installed 13 sorting stations in the most frequented locations on AUC's campus. Each station contained receptacles for the six different kinds of trash the AUC community produces each day: glass, plastic, cans, paper, food and other trash. By March 2014, the University had also installed 30 mini-sorting stations for plastic, cans and trash. However, by 2016, the Committee realized that the 13 sorting stations were inefficient. Following various surveys, the committee concluded that the stations were too large, too confusing and maintenance intensive. To streamline waste management, the bin system was changed from a 6-bin station to a 4-bin station. The 4-bin station contained plastic, cans, food and other trash receptacles. It was realized that the glass bins were hardly used due to the lack of glass products available on campus and that the paper bins were collecting non-recyclable paper-based products.
  • After 4-6 months of use, it was evident that the bins for food were too contaminated with non-food items to be used for composting efforts. Therefore, the committee decided to remove them and transform them into more plastic, cans and other trash bins to make more sorting stations in high-traffic areas. At this point, the Clean and Green team decided to fuse the mini sorting stations and the larger sorting stations to create the 48 sorting stations on the New Cairo campus today with only cans, plastic and collective trash.