This week’s Sustainability Spotlight is about Laura Barnes, the Sustainability Information Curator with the University of Illinois Prairie Research Institute’s Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), who also serves as Executive Director of the Great Lakes Regional Pollution Prevention Roundtable (GLRPPR).
As ISTC’s Sustainability Information Curator, Laura is an embedded librarian who creates and maintains research guides related to pollution prevention and sustainability, including the Green Libraries LibGuide. The guide includes information about Sustainable Libraries, Green Building and Facilities Management, Green Weeding (as in books not gardens), Book Lists and Curriculum Resources, and many more useful green resources. In addition, she also responds to sustainability inquiries from ISTC researchers and the public.
The Great Lakes Regional Pollution Prevention Roundtable (GLRPPR) operates as part of EPA’s national Pollution Prevention Resource Exchange (P2Rx) information network. GLRPPR develops and promotes information resources and training for and facilitates networking among sustainability stakeholders within the six states of U.S. EPA Region 5.
Some of their current projects include analysis of public data sets (Toxics Release Inventory, greenhouse gas emissions, Census Bureau County Business Patterns) to identify the environmental and economic impact of the manufacturing sector in the six states of U.S. EPA Region 5. They have a published paper focused on the food manufacturing industry and will be releasing their final analysis in the next month or so. They also maintain an extensive collection of information resources in a wide variety of industrial sectors, and operate an Ask A Librarian service for people seeking assistance with sustainability questions.
