John T. Pfeffer Sanitation and Resource Recovery Lab

John T. Pfeffer served on the environmental engineering faculty at Illinois from 1967 to 1996. He died in 2017 at age 81. Pfeffer’s research included work in waste management engineering. He served as a trustee for the Urbana-Champaign Sanitary District for 18 years and worked with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. 

The Sanitation and Resource Recovery (SR2) Laboratory will be a Bio-Safety Level II lab that will allow researchers access to urine for experimentation purposes thanks to a direct connection to a restroom on the first floor of the building. While researchers in other environmental programs also utilize human waste streams, Illinois’s lab will be unique in that it will provide researchers access to both a continuous supply of source-separated waste streams and lab space to conduct experiments in real time.

Additional funding is needed to fully equip this lab.