Yale’s ongoing construction on upper Science Hill will feature 600,000 gross square feet for the School of Engineering and Applied Science and more. In accordance with Yale’s promise to achieve net-zero carbon emissions on campus by 2035 and zero actual carbon emissions by 2050, the development will include a thermal utilities plant that will produce energy for the facilities.
But even if operations are sustained by on-site energy production, creating a building from raw materials is quite carbon-intensive. Instead, some of Yale’s building materials will use Pozzotive, an industrial filler made from recycled glass such as drink bottles — the equivalent of 3.5 million of them, to be precise, according to a slideshow used during a recent tour of the glass recycling facility.
At the tour last month, organized by several students at Yale’s School of the Environment, a group of Yale affiliates explored Urban Mining Industries’s facility in Beacon Falls, Connecticut, where recycled glass is processed and turned into a powdery building material known as pozzolan.