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Promoting learning initiatives on sustainability issues and establishing synergies with other universities. This is the aim of the TIME NETWORK project, which met at the Universitat Politècnica de València on the occasion of the Environment Week celebration.

"SusTIMEability-lab Project: Living labs and collaborative initiatives on university campuses for sustainability learning" is the name of the project that has involved 20 students from four universities: the UPV, the ECOLE Centrale Méditerranée in Marseille (ECM), the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH) and the Technological University of Delft (TUDELF), in the Netherlands.

Carla Montagud Montalvá, Deputy Director of Sustainable Development at ETSI Industrial, the centre that hosted this meeting, points out that this project “allows us to establish synergies with other universities within the TIME network, to learn from each other and to give much more strength and impact to our activities concerning the Sustainable Development Goals". José Luis Alapont, Director of the Green Transition Area of the UPV, who also attended the meeting, confirmed the importance of these participatory projects on the road to decarbonisation.

Sharing of challenges

The group of students shared the challenges they had set up in their different universities to raise awareness of the fight against climate change. The aim is to progress towards decarbonisation, which means bringing C02 emissions into line with the activities that offset them.

Throughout the academic year, the team of UPV students set themselves a monthly challenge related to the reduction of water and energy consumption. In short, their project has sought to improve the sustainability of the 5N building of the ETSII, which has been used as a laboratory, a sample field, and a living lab to calculate the carbon footprint. The lecture hall accommodates 1000 students every day.

The 5N building is the ETSII living lab, a best practice building where different innovative solutions are implemented to improve the sustainability of the building in different dimensions: water, energy, circular economy, healthy habits, and social inclusion.

The project is currently under development. "We have developed a data collection and monitoring system that measures the water, electrical, and thermal energy consumption in real-time every 15 minutes. A database will be created, which we plan to share first with the ETSII community and next with the rest of the UPV. This will allow us to quantify the impact of the improvements, as well as the challenges carried out in the building with the participation of the ETSII students. The knowledge acquired will be replicable and transferable to other institutional buildings both at the UPV and in the city of Valencia. It is planned to be able to quantify different indicators of the building's sustainability and display them in real-time on the ETSII screens," explains Montagud.

Raising awareness

María Llorens Garrido, an ETSII student and member of the winning Lideritas team, explains that sometimes it is easier to achieve results with little expenditure, such as changing taps to save water. The most difficult challenge was to "carry out awareness-raising measures" to get students to adopt good sustainability practices. It is planned to create an ETSII community to make school and involve students, administrative staff, and academic staff in the project.

Marie-Anne de Gier, a student at the Delft University of Technology (TUDelft) and in charge of the TUDelf Green Office, expressed her interest in attending this meeting "because you always get good ideas".

TIME Association (Top International Managers in Engineering) is a network of 59 technical universities and engineering schools from 25 countries worldwide.

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