Buried in a massive Department of Defense appropriation bill winding its way through Congress last fall was a $2 million item for research related to drones, the sort of unmanned aircraft that patrol the skies over Afghanistan.

A Navy plane sits in RIT’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability i
n this file photo from July. RIT officials would not allow new
photos of the plane, saying federal regulations now prohibit t
hem from allowing photographs of military vehicles.
(TINA YEE file photo 2010)

The appropriation itself was routine, but the intended recipient might surprise some: the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Slated to break ground on a $38 million headquarters and research center in the fall, the 3-year-old institute is one of RIT’s fastest-growing and most ambitious components. It already attracts more research dollars than any other RIT school or unit.
RIT gives its own twist to a green global buzzword: sustainability.

Most people define sustainability in personal terms — rain gardens, electric cars, solar panels on the roof of a house. But on RIT’s Henrietta campus, sustainability is defined much more broadly. Under the Golisano institute’s umbrella resides research into nanotechnology, electronics assembly and cleaning products. Professors consult with metal finishers, automakers and chemical companies.
Far from being an ivy-covered hall, much of its current headquarters in the Louise M. Slaughter Building looks like a high-tech machine shop.

In Bay 2, a spacious room that could be mistaken for a Fort Drum warehouse, are a pair of engines for drone research, two Marine “Grizzly” troop carriers, a Humvee, an olive drab heavy truck and, until recently, a light armored vehicle.
While Golisano works extensively with businesses, it may be the only sustainability organization on earth that houses an intact A-6E Navy attack aircraft — the kind used in conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq.
And while last fall’s $2 million earmark for work on unmanned aircraft fell victim to congressional infighting, RIT researchers already have done $800,000 worth of work related to drones. With funding from the military, they’re converting engines that could be used for drones, which are unmanned aerial vehicles, so that they can burn jet fuel instead of gas.
All of this — military work, industrial consulting, applied research — fits perfectly into the institute’s broad definition of sustainability.

“The key to sustainability in our mind is making systems smarter,” said Nabil Nasr, founding director of the Golisano institute. “Our definition of sustainability is products that are less consuming, that last longer, that are more durable. It does not mean just environmentally benign.”
At RIT, the focus is on the industrial realm.

“Sustainability has different angles — agriculture, climate change, population growth,” Nasr said. “The one area that has the most impact is manufacturing, and that’s what we focus on. RIT is the largest industrial sustainability program in the nation.”
Funding sources

The Golisano institute is now expanding its academic side — a dozen students are enrolled in graduate programs, with a larger number expected this fall when another master’s program takes shape. But its larger mission is research. Pulling in about $15 million of the $55 million RIT received for the most recent fiscal year, the institute has emerged as the school’s biggest recipient of research grants. A sizable chunk comes from industry — large companies such as Eastman Kodak Co. and Hewlett-Packard Co., and smaller firms such as Byrne Dairy and the Big M supermarket in Canisteo, Steuben County.
Defense and other government grants, though few compared with larger research universities, provide the institute with a valuable underpinning for key research areas.
Some environmentalists note that the military itself is interested in sustainability, but wonder about some of the Golisano institute’s work.

“It seems odd to me that part of a sustainability institute would be to build a better drone aircraft,” said Bill McKibben, a prominent environmentalist and author who teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. “It really doesn’t seem one of the key tasks for improving society.”
Others say simply that military work doesn’t fall within any reasonable definition of sustainability. “They don’t belong in the same sentence. ‘Sustainability’ … points to health and the environment and all that’s alive,” said Barry Sanders, an Oregon educator and author of a book about the environmental impact of the military.
If there has been any protest on the RIT campus about the sustainability institute accepting defense contracts, it hasn’t surfaced publicly. Nor has an RIT oversight committee reviewing grants balked at accepting any of RIT’s defense contracts.
Nasr said the two notions, sustainability and defense work, are compatible. The defense budget, he said, is one of the largest sources of research money in the nation, and he said many defense projects yield results that can be applied to civilian use.
In the Slaughter building, for instance, Navy money is paying for research designed to run a Marine tank or military truck using electricity from a fuel cell. That same fuel cell is being adapted for use in long-haul trucks so that their polluting diesel engines can be turned off when the vehicles are at a rest stop.
What is probably the institute’s signature product to date is a patented system for predicting mechanical failures. In recent years, about $12 million in defense funds went to RIT to develop this technology for military use. But an additional $4 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation funded RIT’s use of this technology for Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority buses and Monroe County alternative fuel vehicles.
RIT now has licensed the technology to a private startup company in Henrietta that Nasr said could soon employ hundreds of people. He cites this as an example of how the Golisano institute could become a major player in the local economy, much like the University of Rochester Medical Center.
“The growth is going to be in the green jobs — from alternative energy to innovation — new products that we are not making today,” Nasr said. “So I think we have tremendous opportunity to create a huge hub here.”
Sustainability’s roots

Sustainability is an outgrowth of the environmental movement, but it has taken on many forms without a clear definition.
Concern about the environment took root in the 1940s when agricultural colleges established conservation programs, which focused on land-use issues. The environmental movement emerged in the 1960s with broader focus on issues ranging from water quality to global warming.
The sustainability movement can be dated to 1987, when the Brundtland Commission, appointed by the United Nations, published a report defining the term as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Since then, the notion has taken hold in many arenas.

“The trajectory that we are in is not sustainable, and if we stay on that trajectory, it’s clear our children and grandchildren won’t do as well,” said Frank DiSalvo, director of Cornell University’s David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, which received an $80 million grant late last year from an alumnus.
There are more than 230 degree-granting sustainability programs at U.S. universities, according to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. They range from agriculture to business to urban studies.
RIT is one of seven universities with graduate programs in sustainable engineering.

Today, companies as disparate as Walmart, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and Nike have launched sustainability programs.
“It’s a big deal,” said Owen Foster, senior vice president of marketing and sustainability at Rochester Midland Corp., a specialty chemical manufacturer that was a founding partner of the Golisano institute. “If I look at my career … there are three major milestones — the environmental movement in the 1970s, and the quality movement in the 1980s and ’90s. The third one that I’m seeing now is sustainability. It’s that big.”
At RIT, the applied-research programs that are the heart of what now is the Golisano institute were first pulled together under a different umbrella — the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies, which was started in 1992 and became one of RIT’s higher-profile endeavors.
Nasr, 56, joined RIT’s faculty in 1989 as an assistant professor of engineering. He became an international expert in remanufacturing — the process of rebuilding equipment rather than replacing it — and was founding director of the National Center for Remanufacturing and Resource Recovery. That center was part of CIMS and now is in the Golisano institute’s orbit.
Early in 2007, RIT commissioned a study by the Rochester-based Center for Governmental Research that showed a sustainability institute could play a substantial role in the local economy. That fall, billionaire B. Thomas Golisano, already one of RIT’s major benefactors, promised $10 million to launch the institute now bearing his name.
“I’m personally very passionate about work in this area,” Nasr said. “It’s becoming my life journey. As an engineer, you discover what you’re not doing and you feel, ‘Gosh, somebody should be doing this.'”
RIT’s focus

Four applied research centers make up the core of the institute and focus on specialties such as remanufacturing and sustainable transportation. A fifth center works on the use of nanotechnology in power generation and storage. Photovoltaic cells, which convert solar energy to electricity, are a specialty. A sixth center, the Pollution Prevention Institute, was created and is funded by New York state. RIT leads the institute but work is shared by three other universities. They consult with companies to reduce their use of hazardous materials, energy and natural resources.
“We are focusing on man-made products. We focus on development. In this area, I think we are the largest research program in the country,” Nasr said.
There’s a core staff of nine faculty members, but dozens of other faculty members, researchers and students work on sustainability projects. The institute’s budget in the fiscal year that ended June 30 was about $16 million.
Over the years, about 75 percent of all grants for sustainability work at RIT have been from private companies, Nasr said, and 9 percent from federal agencies. The rest come from state and local agencies, foundations and nonprofits. The federal grants typically are much larger, making up 56 percent of total grant funding.
While funding from federal sources is not insignificant, the Golisano institute’s share pales in comparison to other universities. The University of Rochester, Cornell University and Columbia University all get five to 10 times more federal money than RIT, according to data on a federal transparency website that lists federal grants and contracts.
RIT has received 156 defense-related grants since 2000 totaling $45 million, according to the website. UR got 480 such grants for $98 million over that same period. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was given 650 grants for $73 million, and Cornell received 1,021 grants for $168 million.
At RIT, work on defense projects started long before the Golisano institute was established. The A-6E has been in the Slaughter building — its wings had to be removed to get it in — since 2003. Although the Intruder has been mothballed since the mid-1990s, a sister aircraft, the EA-6B Prowler, is still flying off Navy carrier decks, and Golisano researchers are studying problems with the hydraulic system, which is used to control key parts of the aircraft.
The underlying purpose of that project, like multiple projects involving military vehicles, was to extend the life of the equipment. Increased efficiency was the goal of work already performed on the unmanned drones, as well as the project whose funding evaporated late last year.
Nasr and other institute officials aren’t apologetic about the defense work. To them, extending the life of an armored vehicle carries the same benefit as extending the life of a car. “If I can get things … to last twice as long, I can reduce my material demand drastically,” Nasr said.
He said none of the sustainability institute’s work is classified.

But some items in a lab were removed from public view before a reporter and photographer recently toured the Slaughter building.
Other objects, like the A6-E, were not allowed to be photographed on the tour — RIT officials cited new government regulations — even though the plane had been photographed at previous media events.
Growth and limits

The institute now shares the 170,000-square-foot Slaughter building with other departments. Groundbreaking is scheduled for spring on the sustainability institute’s 83,000-square-foot facility on the campus’s west side. The structure is funded in part by a $13 million federal grant and $10 million in state money.
It will have room for test beds and labs, including one to study how computer data centers can use less electricity, and one to work on electronic waste. The building itself will be a sort of test bed: A “micro-grid” will carry electricity throughout the structure but also will be used to study how to integrate supplies from renewable sources such as fuel cells and wind turbines.
Nasr expects to outgrow the new building in a few years.

From its inception, the Golisano institute was viewed as a green economic engine that would employ people directly and spin off companies that would employ many more. The 2007 study by the Center for Governmental Research said a sustainability institute could someday lead to 6,000 jobs with an annual payroll of $650 million.
A model that Nasr cites is the nanotechnology and microelectronics development in the Albany region, which has drawn $13 billion in private and government investment and created thousands of jobs.
“If we have the right support, we can see something like the nanotech hub in Albany,” he said.

Nasr said government aid has been scarce due to budget woes, but he’s optimistic that will change.
Kent Gardner, CGR president and co-author of the 2007 study, said the estimated job creation remains possible.

Whether the RIT center could ever match the nanotech hub is another question. “It was a positive perfect storm,” Gardner said. “It’s tough to get that kind of investment from the public sector, and it’s rough to navigate that kind of investment from the private sector. You don’t have a lot of examples like that around the country.”
Gardner counts himself a fan of Nasr but said the Golisano institute remains “to a large extent unknown. People don’t understand all the good stuff that’s going on over there.
“Albany nano is easier to describe. It’s going deep in one technology, as opposed to a whole bunch of things,” Gardner said. “But at the same time, that really fits the whole sustainability initiative. Sustainability is about a lot of different technologies.”
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Funding for RIT’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability

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Funding for RIT’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability

Federal and state grants received by the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability and its predecessor center. Data is for the fiscal years 2006-2010