Student Projects

This project will increase beverage container recycling by increasing the number of multi-material recycling containers on campus and improve the signage of those bins based on student input. Market research will be conducted to determine feedback on priority locations and a measure of recycling awareness. This information will be used to select locations for new outdoor bins and possibly redesign the bins to be more user friendly.

This project aims to monitor water use in campus buildings, targe the most wasteful facilities, and bring quantifiable savings to the University while promoting conservation on campus. This project will connect the water meters in several campus buildings to the online Obvius server to get real-time use data, perform short-term metering of specific bathrooms and other areas of water use, install water sub-metes in several campus buildings to get water-use information at a finer resolution, and install a pilot project of dual-flush toilets and pint-flush urinals to conserve water.

In an effort to make Wurster Hall a more sustainable campus building, a group of students, staff and faculty are working together to find ways to reduce the building's environmental footprint. To address one of the primary concerns, food waste, a need for a compost program was identified. Wurster Hall occupants will begin by implementing composting in Ramona's Cafe on the first floor.

Berkeley Innovation, a student run product design group, observed that because students are given a single bin in their residence hall rooms, they fail to separate trash within their room and thus do not distinguish waste from recyclables at the chute. Based on interviews and front-end research, Berkeley Innovation has designed better recycling bins to fit the needs of recycling in residence halls and will do market research to determine the most effective design.

The mission of the Berkeley Student Food Cooperative (BSFC) is to provide fresh, healthy, environmentally sustainable, and ethically produced food at an affordable price to Berkeley students. The BSFC will be a student-run natural and sustainable food cafe and market based on the cooperative model. A cooperative is a democratic, equally owned enterprise based on principles of open membership, democratic member control, autonomy and independence, education, cooperation among cooperatives, and concern for community.

Values that guide cooperatives include self-help, self-responsibility, equality, equity, and solidarity. The BSFC will promote community building, social justice and environmental stewardship and offer our customers 20–40% savings on healthy, sustainable, delicious food through the cooperative model. The Berkeley Student Food Cooperative will be an expansion of the existing market “The Local” (run by the ASUC Sustainability Team), which provides affordable sustainable food items to the UC Berkeley campus.

ESW-Berkeley in conjunction with EH&S will create a native plant nursery and garden between Giannini Hall and Wellman Court to support the restoration of Strawberry Creek, This project is driven by four purposes: to maintain a seed stock for restoring the creek's riparian zone with native plants, to preserve species endemic to Strawberry Creek whose existence are threatened by the spread of invasive species, to provide ecosystem services to the campus landscape, and to serve as an effective site for environmental education.

The GA Environmental Sustainability committee aims to have Anthony Hall LEED-Existing Buildings certified to reduce resource consumption and serve as a model for other campus buildings looking to certify their building. Tasks to bring Anthony Hall up to standard include task lighting for each desk, implementing a composting program, installing a programmable thermostat, and swapping out less energy-efficient light bulbs.

This campaign educates researchers to close the sashes on fume
hoods when they are not in use to reduce their energy consumption and improve air quality. This program
targeted at Tan hall and uses stickers, flyers, and emails to disseminate information and involves a
competition to see which lab can reduce their sash height by the most.

Vending misers are motion sensors that power down the vending machines
when they are not in use. Green Campus has installed vending misers on 14 machines across campus and
has monitored their energy consumption on a weekly basis.

A campaign educating staff and faculty how to easily reduce their
energy consumption in the Haas School of Business.

In collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Office of Sustainability, the project will establish
guidelines and a checklist, similar to the Bay Area Green Business Certification, for UC Berkeley departments
that take the extra step to make their workspace “greener.”

The Energy DeCal course utilizes innovative curriculum to teach a class of 20-30 students
about the lifecycle consequences of our energy consumption and alternative energy technologies. Students
take the course for two units and complete assignments such as a personal energy audit and group project
that involves designing materials to teach other students and staff about how we can reduce energy
consumption at UC Berkeley. Green Campus has taught eight semesters of this course to over 155 students.

Green Campus presents during training sessions, provides support for environmental
programs, and gives a Best Motivator award to the student hall staff members in the residence halls.

The Blackout Battles is an energy competition between Unit 1, Unit
2, Unit 3, and Unit 4 (Foothill, Bowles, and Stern) in the residence halls. These competitions are held every semester since spring 2005 and include prizes such as ice cream parties.

The light bulb exchange involves an exchange of students’ incandescent light bulbs for
13-watt compact florescent bulbs, which use roughly 25% of the energy that incandescent bulbs consume. We exchanged approximately 4,900 light bulbs in the past four years.

Each year Boalt's Environmental Law Society partners with other organizations on campus to host an environmental justice symposium. The symposium brings together students, faculty, community members, lawyers, policy-makers, and activists to learn about one another's work, strengthen existing relationships and re-energize for future action.

The Treeblogger is now online! Providing your needed dose of environmental news (legal and not) and diatribes. Check it out. Tell your friends. We're saving paper and taking names. If you have ideas you'd like to see posted, email us.

PROPOSED PROJECT: Transportation and Parking Services has the dual charter of providing alternative transportation and ensuring adequate parking for faculty, staff and students. These opposing priorities have become significant and stable barriers to any alternative transportation program. Developing new policies to reduce single occupancy vehicle commuters, and consequently emissions, would be a political debate for this campus. Yet the benefits to discouraging single drivers is significant.

PROPOSED PROJECT: The University’s academic curriculum needs to demonstrate a more serious commitment towards addressing climate change. Initiatives taken by the Education for Sustainable Living Program can help jumpstart student-led courses at the grassroots level. Additionally, the University’s Academic Senate, the representative body of the University faculty that can exercise some influence over academic matters, can create a core curriculum focused on climate change (About UC Governance, 2006). At the least, it should create a “flexible course module” on climate change that would be offered to all faculty to be integrated into relevant existing course offerings.

PROPOSED PROJECT: Work with administrators at other UC schools and the UCOP to lobby the state legislature to address capital budget funding reform. – Although this may the most difficult recommendation to implement, it may also be one of the most important as funding is probably the most important institutional barrier restricting emission reduction projects. UC Berkeley needs to work with other UC schools to push funding reform related to capital budget on two issues:
- Allow the capital budget to borrow from the operating budget;
- Ensure that bid reversions stay with the campus to fund energy efficiency components that may have been removed during value-engineering.

FUNDED PROJECT (TGIF): a visible dashboard in UC Berkeley website – The University does not currently have an integrated system to manage information relevant to GHG emissions generated by campus activities. Data collection from some potentially important sources (e.g., campus fleet, commute, air travel) is manual and often in terms of cost. This is particularly true for air travel, where there is no system that tracks air travel trips or mileage. Also, information on different GHG emissions sources is not integrated. It was not until we performed the inventory that we realized the relative size of the different sources of emissions on campus. This is typical of most institutions given that climate change mitigation is a fairly recent interest.

PROPOSED PROJECT: In addition to an overarching Office/director of Sustainability, awareness and coordination on the academic departmental level would be helpful in creating a culture of energy conservation that leads to reduced emissions by students and faculty. Every department needs a sustainability coordinator who is trained in principles of energy savings and can manage and communicate sustainability and GHG reduction data on a departmental level. These coordinators can disseminate information from the Directory of Sustainability (to be hired) and help implement mandates and policies created by administration and governing student bodies; they can also assess what types of policies are most effective.

PROPOSED PROJECT: fund graduate students to work with CCAR to improve the GHG reporting standards based on UCB experience and research.

PROPOSED PROJECT: Develop an online community which incorporates CalCAP experience in developing GHG inventories for different sources, and advertise this across the UC system. This wiki would become an interactive repository of best-practices for developing GHG inventories, and could ultimately be used to inform standards development.

PROPOSED PROJECT: The City of Berkeley passed Measure G in 2006, which calls for the city to reduce its carbon emissions. The City will soon begin collecting voluntary offsets payment from its residents for investment in local offset projects. These projects will invest this money into local programs that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, investment in the “Solar Schools” program is one such idea. If UC Berkeley were to join this program, it could contribute to the offset fund, and also benefit from some of the projects. UC Berkeley students could help to get this project off of the ground.

PROPOSED PROJECT: Currently all electricity is paid for by the central campus, and only some of the buildings are metered. This project would reduce energy consumption by creating financial incentives for departments to identify wasted energy, and adjust their practices to reduce energy consumption. A metering and data collection system would be established (using UC Berkeley technology), followed by a period over which baseline data would be collected. After establishment of the baseline, some type of incentive program would be established. For example: (1) Cap-and-trade program, or (2) Provide financial incentives to departments for reductions from baseline energy consumption (i.e., return 50% of electricity savings directly to the department).

Project to create and produce an innovative protype individual trash receptacle, with subdivided compartments, for use by students within their dorm room to make it easy to keep separate the different types of recyclables.

Need: $1,000, 100% funded

Project to work with the Food Systems Committee of the UC Berkeley Student Union Sustainability Team to cooperatively operate the student-run produce stand at Kroeber Fountain every Wednesday from 11am to 3pm, providing fresh, local, organic produce from the farmer’s market to the campus and surrounding community.

Need: $2,000, 25% funded

Project to cover the cost of showing environmental films and advance printed posters/ads/fliers to promote participation in the upcoming Earth Week 2008.

Need: $4,000, 25% funded

Project for garden border boxes, supplies and tools, composting bins, and installation of an irrigation system to create an outdoors classroom with border gardens at University Village, which houses over 820 students and their families in Albany.

Need: $2,500, 40% funded

Project to pilot an electricity efficient model at I-House for student residential settings, which can be thereafter used by the Greek housing system and other student residences. This grant is to implement steps that reduce electrical use at I-House. Since I-House gets its power from PG&E, the successfulness of steps taken to reduce electricity consumption/savings will be measurable and can be easily tracked via the monthly billing.

Need: $10,000, 15% funded

Project to cultivate a 100 square feet green plant/soil cover on the roof of a campus building. Studies show such green roofs host soil and plant communities, contribute to increased stormwater retention, reduce urban “heat island” issues, reduce heat flow to building interior, and support wildlife. Placed adjacent to rooftop mechanical equipment, a green roof can reduce energy use for cooling compressors by 16%. Data-logging equipment borrowed from the Pacific Energy Center will be used to determine reduction in energy use compared to a conventional roof.

Need: $10,900, 15% funded

Project to replace the existing 181 incandescent light bulbs in the lobby of Zellerbach Playhouse with low energy consumption compact florescent light bulbs. The bulbs are in use many evenings and weekends year round, up to eight hours at a time. The switch can be accomplished in a total of less than three hours.

Need: $2,000, 100% funded

Project to create sustainable practices in Wurster Hall’s Design Studios, which produce tomorrow’s architects, planners, and landscape architects.

Need: $2,990, 66% funded

Project to start the Greening Research@Berkeley (GR@B) Initiative

Need: $10,000, 35% funded

Project to continue the highly successful Green Campus Program. For the last three years, this program has coordinated three light bulb exchanges, hosted Blackout Battles among campus residence halls to reduce energy, and displayed showrooms of best sustainable practices in The Green Room, The Green Suite, and The Green Apartment. This program is estimated to have generated about $100,000 in electrical energy savings so far.

Need: $5,000, 80% funded

Big Ideas @ Berkeley marketplace lets alumni, corporate and foundation partners, friends, and family support Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students who are passionate about tackling major global, regional, and local challenges such as clean energy, the environment, public health, safe drinking water, public policy, and technology-based entrepreneurship.