This year the University of Idaho Sustainability Center gave away $23,040 in grants to support three research projects designed to produce a more sustainable campus.

Groups will have the year to complete their intensive studies and will present their finished product in June.
Alecia Hoene, director of the Sustainability Center and a graduate student, said all the proposals were very strong and aim to do great things.

“It’s exciting to finally see groups of students wanting to take (sustainability projects) on and make them an instant thing,” she said.

Helping fight the war on hunger
Esther Ngumbi received the most funding of all the grant winners, $10,760. She was not new to the grant writing process and said she felt her proposal was very solid.

“We are happy we got the funding to do what we wanted,” she said. “Everyone was dancing, we were so happy.”
Ngumbi has worked closely with the city council in its efforts on the war on hunger. Now Ngumbi is using her experience with these community actions to change the views of UI students.

Ngumbi, who worked with the UI War on Hunger Group and the Moscow Area Hunger Alliance, said students throw away more than 4,000 pounds of food each semester. Her project will provide students an easy way to donate to less fortunate students as well as to a sustainable campus by reducing waste.

During the last week of the semester ­— when most students are packing up to leave for winter break — tents will be set up near campus residences so students can easily donate items they no longer want or have use for. Ngumbi said her team will be accepting all items.

“Everything — food, clothing, whatever,” she said. “We will take it. There are a lot of people who need these things.”
Ngumbi said the project is still in the brainstorming stage. Her team is working to collaborate with ASUI International Friendship Corporation, an organization that rents out needed supplies to international students, as well as the Moscow Area Hunger Alliance. She said there are many resources available.

Ngumbi said ASUI is working to round up student volunteers to put boxes around campus as well. Boxes will be helpful to students who live on upper floors. Ngumbi said she does not want the pain of trucking items down flights of stairs to discourage students from donating.

Donations will be accepted Dec. 12-17. There will be adequate signage to make students aware of what’s going on, Ngumbi said.

In late November, Ngumbi’s team will host a forum designed to teach students about the issues of recycling.
“We want students to learn something about the issue now so the future can share this wonderful place,” she said.
At the end of the year Ngumbi said her team will report to the Sustainability Center what went well and what needs work.

Reducing energy consumption at UI
Harshana Thimmanna and A. B. Rakesh Kamal had never written a grant before. It took them 10 revisions to come up with their final presentation, which won them a $10,650 grant.

Thimmanna, a graduate student studying sustainable architecture and Kamal, a graduate student in environmental engineering, will be conducting an energy assessment of six to eight buildings on campus. They will focus especially on large access buildings such as the Idaho Commons and Student Union Building.

All buildings on campus have meters that measure energy use per day. Thimmanna and Kamal have been working closely with facilities to obtain and filter this information to create a presentation of the most important data. While recording energy use, the team will take into account square footage, age and use of the building. They will then take that information and compare it to the previous year’s energy use. That information would then be used to develop ways to cut down on energy consumption.

Thimmanna said she would like to see a 5 percent reduction in energy consumption across all buildings. Thimmanna and Kamal already have some ideas to help lower energy use. Kamal said he noticed computers in the Commons are on all the time. He said having those computers go into a hibernation mode after a certain amount of time without use would be a simple way to lower energy consumption.

He also said replacing common lighting in buildings with smaller individual lighting or motion-sensor lights would help. This way, energy wouldn’t be wasted to light offices that people are not occupying.
“Lights are on 24/7 and it’s not always necessary,” Kamal said. “Small things like this would make a big difference.”

By next semester, Thimmanna and Kamal will have their information ready to present to the public, which is another major aspect of their project: keeping the public educated.

Thimmanna said an exact method of doing this hasn’t been refined but the information would be shown in each corresponding building via posters or some other method.

The team knows it will be important to create a pilot program that would be easy to use as an ongoing study even after they have finished their graduate study. The team also hopes to develop educational programs and set up tables outside the Commons to keep people informed.

“People keep coming and going,” Kamal said. “There needs to be a continuous process of education. We want to see that people keep updating the data.”

Thimmanna and Kamal said the team hopes to eventually develop a sort of competition between buildings to lower their energy consumption to get people thinking about energy conservation and wanting to participate.
“It’s a lot about changing the attitudes of people,” Kamal said.

Composting project at McCall school
The McCall Outdoor Science School was created in 2001, an extension of the UI campus first used as a forestry summer camp. The graduate student program started in 2003.
Representing UI at the MOSS are Jen Kullgren and Jacob Dolence. Dolence is a graduate student studying conservation and social science. Kullgren is a graduate from the University of Michigan and an environmental science major.

In the 15-credit program, graduate students take ecology classes while gaining outdoor leadership skills. Kullgren and Dolence act as the primary teachers of the 50-70 K-12 students who visit the school every week, presenting the subject of ecology to them in fun and entertaining ways.

“It’s a really neat program,” Dolence said. “We’re taking grad classes one week and teaching fifth and sixth graders the next.”
With the grant they received, Kullgren and Dolence hope to raise the level of awareness students have about their affect on the environment. The team saw food waste as a major problem for students at the elementary school level.

The $1,630 they received will be used to purchase a compost machine which will turn wasted food into mulch. The compost will then be used to fertilize vegetation that students will be helping plant around the school.
“The compost machine will be a great addition to MOSS,” Kullgren said. “It will reduce the impact on the local ecosystem.”

“This is a great way to receive money for something that we needed and to show students and the public what they can do,” Dolence said.

The school currently has a system of measuring food waste. To increase student awareness, all unused food is placed into buckets at the end of a meal. This way students can see exactly how much food they are wasting and get tips on how to cut down.

Kullgren and Dolence will take the three weeks in between Thanksgiving and Christmas — a slow time of the year — to get the compost program underway.

When their grant ends in 2008, Kullgren and Dolence will travel back to the UI campus to present their findings and to report on the success of their program with the addition of the compost machine.

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