Student capstone and applied projects from ASU's School of Sustainability.

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Description

For decades, understanding the complexity of behaviors, motivations, and values has interested researchers across various disciplines. So much so that there are numerous terms, frameworks, theories, and studies devoted to understanding these complexities and how they interact and evolve into actions. However, little research has examined how employee behaviors translate

For decades, understanding the complexity of behaviors, motivations, and values has interested researchers across various disciplines. So much so that there are numerous terms, frameworks, theories, and studies devoted to understanding these complexities and how they interact and evolve into actions. However, little research has examined how employee behaviors translate into the work environment, particularly regarding perceived organizational success. This study advances research by quantitatively assessing how a greater number of individual employees’ pro-environmental behaviors are related to the perceived success of environmentally sustainable workplace activities. We have concluded that the more pro-environmental behaviors an employee embodies, the more positively they perceive the success of their local government's sustainable purchasing policy. Additionally, other factors matter, including organizational behaviors, like training, innovation, and reduction of red tape.

ContributorsFox, Angela (Author) / Darnall, Nicole (Thesis advisor) / Bretschneider, Stuart (Committee member) / Behravesh, Shirley-Ann (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2022-04-19
Description
The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) is a nonprofit organization with a mission to fund research for cures and treatments for blood-related cancer. Light The Night is one of the largest peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising events, with approximately 1 million participants in 140 locations throughout the United States and Canada. Participants

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) is a nonprofit organization with a mission to fund research for cures and treatments for blood-related cancer. Light The Night is one of the largest peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising events, with approximately 1 million participants in 140 locations throughout the United States and Canada. Participants walk with illuminated lanterns to commemorate survivors, friends, family, and supporters. Sustainability has become a recent concern for the organization's corporate partners and participants. LLS has shown an increased dedication to sustainability by creating an Environmental Social Governance (ESG) council and has started taking steps toward creating a national plan for sustainability at its Light The Night events. In order to extend sustainability efforts to all Light The Night events, the client requests the Sustainable Light Knights team to: 1. Perform a materiality assessment for the Light The Night event, accounting for the recent changes that seek to minimize sustainability practices. 2. Rank the event's most material activities, considering food and beverage, waste, lanterns, and t-shirts. 3. Assess the best practices for managing the highest material impacts. 4. Identify short, medium, and long-term goals to help LLS plan for the next steps. The Sustainable Light Knights consist of four Arizona State University graduate students from the Masters of Sustainability Solutions program. The team undertook an analytical approach to understand P2P events, including conducting a landscape analysis, identifying best practices, and completing a TOWS (threats, opportunities, weaknesses, and strengths) analysis. This served as the foundation for the materiality assessment for Light The Night, which guided what impact topics were most relevant. To bring the findings of the materiality matrix to life, The Sustainable Light Knights created a sustainable event planning checklist, procurement guidelines, and a vendor pledge for use by Light The Night staff. We grouped the recommendations for sustainable actions into low, medium, and high priority and short, medium, and long-term goals. While this assessment focused on Light The Night, the recommendations outlined in this action plan can extend to other fundraising events organized by LLS. The design of the action plan is to help LLS leadership and staff take steps to lower the impact of Light The Night events nationwide and transform LLS into a leader within sustainable events that can serve as an example for other nonprofit organizations to follow.
ContributorsGreathouse, Madelynne (Author) / Guerrero, Morgan Leon (Author) / Rodriguez, Rebeca (Author) / Skoric, Kirby (Author)
Created2023-04-26
Description
Buildings have many negative effects on the environment and people. The development industry needs to reduce those impacts to improve sustainable outcomes. Opportunities for the biggest gains in sustainable development begin with design professionals like Shepley Bullfinch, a national architectural firm. The firm is engaged in this project to assess

Buildings have many negative effects on the environment and people. The development industry needs to reduce those impacts to improve sustainable outcomes. Opportunities for the biggest gains in sustainable development begin with design professionals like Shepley Bullfinch, a national architectural firm. The firm is engaged in this project to assess current sus-tainability performance in business operations and design processes. This project includes a three-part sustainability assessment of the firm, stakeholder engagement session using the ABCD-procedure of the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) (Broman, 2017), and an assessment of three peer firms for comparison. The final deliverable of this pro-ject is a sustainability consultant report which compiles all of the information gathered about Shepley Bulfinch and the three peer firms, a writeup of the engagement session, an example of what a sustainable architecture firm could look like, and recommendations and resources to implement sustainability principles and strategies. The outcomes of this project found opportunities for improvement and provided recommendations for strategic action for the firm. This project has the potential to help Shepley Bulfinch become more sustainable in business oper-ations and positively affect millions of square feet of buildings through their design and devel-opment process.
ContributorsWager, Tari (Author)
Created2019-05-15
Description

COVID-19 brought so much uncertainty into the world and has molded this project into what it is today. The first project journey that was chosen was meant to show the impact of how much plastic waste was being produced at Starbucks. Then due to COVID-19 yet again, it changed into

COVID-19 brought so much uncertainty into the world and has molded this project into what it is today. The first project journey that was chosen was meant to show the impact of how much plastic waste was being produced at Starbucks. Then due to COVID-19 yet again, it changed into how much paper waste there was within the State of Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) Business and Professions Division (BPD). DOL BPD is a state agency division that licenses over forty plus professional and business licenses to the residents of Washington state. Due to the pandemic, the project transformed into how the three pillars of sustainability impacts remote work within BPD. BPD is in this new and unique paradigm where the deliverable that was brought forth as this project completed are, “The 9 Benefits of Sustainability through Remote Work” (Appendix D) where this specifically showed DOL why remote work is sustainable and how it should be implemented even further throughout the agency. This list was put together with the benefits that best fit DOL BPD.

ContributorsReynolds, Jordan (Writer of accompanying material)
Created2021-02-11