After a whirlwind 72 hours of ideating, testing, and building, over 300 students gathered in the Biltmore Innovation Center for the Play with Purpose Sustainability Hackathon showcase. Teams arrived ready to pitch their solutions to real-world sustainability challenges. And the stakes of the friendly competition? Four FIFA World Cup match tickets and a guaranteed interview for the Cox Cleantech Residency.

Veronica Apecena never expected to launch a retail business. And now, Apecena is the owner of Joyful Jarra, a refillery providing non-toxic, low-waste, and a variety of locally sourced home and body products to Atlantans. More than just a place to bring your collection of favorite jars (jarra in Spanish) and refill them with sustainable alternatives for yourself and your home, Joyful Jarra is also dedicated to closing the large employment gap experienced by people with developmental disability and neurodivergent labels by creating jobs and training opportunities.

Georgia Tech researchers and community advocates with Propel ATL are attaching temperature and air quality sensors to their backpacks and bikes to get on-the-ground data that will show where the city is hottest. The goal of the Neutralizing Onerous Heat Effects on Active Transportation (NO-HEAT) Initiative, led by Dr. Rounaq Basu, is to mitigate the negative impact of extreme heat by providing city planners with actionable data to make design changes to make cities cooler where they are needed most, and by empowering people to find the coolest walking and biking routes as they move around the city.

Buildings, lights, streets, and sidewalks. The built environment is the designed spaces that we live in, work from, and travel through. Seung Jae Lieu’s research at Georgia Tech focuses on the built environment, and specifically, where it is possible to walk from one place to another, known as walkability. Lieu developed the “Harmony of Amenities” metric to explore why people choose to walk or drive, even when an area has nearby amenities.

“We have to design with uncertainty based on what is not known about sea level rise, climate, and different futures,” said Matthijs Bouw, presenter at the Georgia Tech Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics (CURA) 2026 Urban Resilience Leadership Symposium. At the symposium, experts and researchers shared how navigating uncertainty about the impacts of climate change is shaping city planners' actions to build urban resilience.

Last semester, faculty, students, and researchers gathered in the Hodges Room at Centergy One for the latest IPaT GVU Lunch Lecture. Dr. Carl DiSalvo, professor in the School of Interactive Computing, took the floor to pose a simple but unsettling question: What if the real power of design is not what we produce, but how we stand with people along the way?

Inspire Placemaking Collective is shaping places that shape communities.

From the Biltmore Innovation Center, the firm planted its Atlanta office in Tech Square in April 2025, a full-circle move after drawing inspiration from the district years earlier.

On a summer Atlanta afternoon, the temperature can shift block by block. A street lined with trees feels bearable. Two intersections over, asphalt radiates heat and the air hangs heavy. Those differences are not incidental, nor are they harmless. For PhD candidate Ashley Boone, data provides a pathway to change that reality by mapping, interpreting, and mobilizing environmental patterns in the city.

What started as a six-person, virtual book club is now a volunteer-led network of over 600 women across Atlanta who are building a greener future. When challenges are complex, such as with climate change, nurturing a community is a powerful starting point. This perspective is at the heart of the Atlanta Women in Sustainability, who gather, share stories and ideas, and explore solutions to society’s biggest challenges.

Last week, faculty, students, partners, and sustainability leaders gathered at the Tech Square Clubhouse to celebrate a major milestone for the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education, known across campus as SCoRE. The event marked ten years of the Center’s work advancing interdisciplinary sustainability research, education, and community-centered collaboration at Georgia Tech and beyond.

Ecolyfe’s pivot from consumer energy savings to utility-scale forecasting has positioned the startup to influence national power grids and renewable integration worldwide.

Just as many of us are familiar with “reduce, reuse, recycle”, collaboration, community, and collective impact are central to building a resilient future and core elements of the Atlanta Sustainability Ambassador Program. On November 17th, 2025, the community-building milestone of empowering 500 ambassadors was celebrated at the City Council Meeting. Ambassadors shared stories about how the program has impacted their sustainability efforts in their businesses, workplaces, or at home.

For Georgia Tech’s Yanni Loukissas, the core question is simple: “How can we inspire people to use data as a means of changing the way they see the places they live?” His work shows that data can be more than numbers. “It can reshape how everyday residents understand and care for their communities.”

Pairing a lifelong interest in cooking, especially the gathering with friends and family around the table, with financial responsibility is what inspired Ivan Zou, the co-founder of Raccoon Eyes, to dig into the problem of food waste. Ivan shares, “When I started seeing how much food was being not eaten by students and wasted in kitchens, I was inspired to find a solution at the intersection of the kitchen and consumer that could help avoid both waste and economic cost.”

In communities across the country, organizations are collecting data in record amounts, but the harder task is turning those insights into progress people can see and feel.