The university operates twenty LEED-certified buildings across three of the five overarching LEED categories. Examples include the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, the first brewery, winery or food-processing facility in the world to achieve Platinum-level certification and the Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) at Lake Tahoe, one of only five laboratories in the world to achieve Platinum-level certification. It developed UC Davis West Village as a "zero net energy" community.
The university received two Best Practice Awards at the 2009 annual Sustainability Conference, held by the University of California, California State University and the California Community Colleges, for the campus's lighting retrofit project and sustainable design in new construction.
UC Davis harvests olives from the old trees on campus to produce olive oil and table olives for use in campus dining rooms. It has designed landscaping with drought-tolerant trees and other plants. The campus operates its own landfill, …
