The Successes of Campus Clean-Up Day!

Amidst Alumni weekend and 50th Anniversary events, students were working hard to maintain the aesthetic beauty and ecosystem health of our unique campus. Almost 100 volunteers from Greek life, the Sustainability Office, the Student Union Assembly, and other student organizations turned up early Sunday morning for the first Annual Campus Cleanup Day. Volunteers broke up into teams all throughout campus to collect over 200 pounds of litter - this was all material that hadn't made it into a nearby trash can or dumpster!

Many of these items weren't even destined for the landfill, but were able to be recycled or composted. Even more shocking - and a credit to the diligence of our participants - were the 3 pounds worth of cigarette butts, amounting to roughly 1.5% of the total litter collected. We hope to make Campus Cleanup Days a recurring event, so if you have a passion for getting wasted and staying trashy, look out for future newsletters to get involved!

May 2015 Green Tip: Sustainable Art

Do you have any old glass bottles or bottle caps? Would you rather repurpose products instead of recycling them? You can turn them into beautiful art pieces! Meesh Montgomery and Jacquelyne Vera, students at UCSC, do just that. With Mother's Day coming up, you can show your mom -and Mother Earth- how much you love her by making sustainable and recycled art.

Meesh makes flower vases, watering devices for their plants, and paper flowers. They use glass bottles, paper, and bottle caps that they find in recycling bins or laying around. They have always had a passion for art and when they started school here, they had a new passion: sustainability. So, they combined the two to make sustainable art.

Meesh says their favorite part of recycled art is how good they feel while making it. They say that, first of all, it relieves a lot of their stress. Second, they feel good being sustainable while doing something they love. They would love to delve more into larger sculptures using recycled materials, but they don't have enough space in their dorm room.

Jacquelyne makes jewelry/charms out of polymer clay and different pattern friendship bracelets. She uses any items she comes across as inspiration. She's currently learning how to make koi ponds and flower gardens in Altoid cans, pies in bottle caps, and terrariums in old light bulbs.

Jacquelyne says her favorite part of making things is how fun it is. She enjoys making things while watching random youtube videos and finds it relaxing. She likes seeing her friends' faces when she gives them the items.

Below are some of her amazing and adorable creations:

Innovative Approaches to Sustainability at Other Campuses

Here are a few selections of the innovative approaches to sustainability taking place on other college campuses. Each of these examples was chosen because they represent ideas that UCSC could potentially implement in some form, or in some cases, already has begun to. If you see something here that you want to make a reality at UCSC, contact the Sustainability Office susted@ucsc.edu and we will help you direct your ideas toward fruition! 

UC Irvine student uses art to inspire climate activism
In art student Kathleen Deck's "Conservation Through Creation” art installation, a section of lawn won’t be watered for a month. The idea is to return an artificial environment to its natural state, and start a discussion about how the changing climate can affect water use and the fragile environment that people have created. Deck is one of 37 UC Carbon Neutrality Initiative Fellows. 

University of Illinois announces winners for Green Office Program
The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) announced award winners for its 2014-15 Certified Green Office Program on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Twenty-four participating offices collected hardware for making commitments toward and achieving energy and resource reductions during the school year. Here, at UCSC, we also have a Green Office Certification Program.

New Adventures for Lacey Raak in Monterey

Lacey Raak, UCSC's Sustainability Director, has recently accepted the Sustainability Director position at Cal State Monterey Bay where she will be creating and implementing a culture of sustainability. Though we are all sad she is leaving, we are also very excited to hear of her soon to be many accomplishments at CSMB.

Before her departure, we asked her a couple questions about her time at UCSC.

When did you become sustainability director, and what were some of the things you did before coming to UCSC? 
My first "real-world" job after completing my undergrad degree was an intern at the US State Department in DC. I worked in the Office of Environmental and Scientific Affairs and reported to the UN Special Representative for Sustainable Development. When I went back to MN I worked at a marketing firm that specialized in organic and natural food products and worked closely with the music industry. I moved to CA for graduate school and went to the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey where I received a masters in International Environmental Policy. While in graduate school I worked at the City of Monterey, where I helped develop their first Climate Action Plan and the Bicycle Transportation Plan. After graduation I received a Fulbright Scholarship to study the National Sustainable Development Strategy in Indonesia, I worked at the City again after my return and before coming to UC Santa Cruz. That is a timeline of my work history, but from a more philosophical perspective - before coming to UCSC, I learned, I traveled, I explored. I met people, learned from them and carry what they taught me, with me even though I know I will likely never see them again. I treated the whole world like a classroom, and teachers are everywhere.

What has been your favorite moment working at UCSC in the sustainability office? 
I have so many images pop into my mind for this one - doing qi gong with students at the inter-org retreat, sitting around a table with staff putting together a program or thinking about how to better train and support students, working with people outside our office to integrate sustainability into procurement or to find ways to build more sustainable buildings, exploring a cave, having lunch at PICA with Annie Leonard, every time students would pop into my office to share some news or just say hi, having the Chancellor tell me I was doing a good job.  All the close encounters with animals...seeing a bobcat by the library, seeing a mountain lion early in the morning, having a fox cross the road in from of me, the owl that almost pooped on my head.  I have so many cherished memories to carry with me!

What have you learned here that you would like to take to your next position at CSUMB? 
Not to be cliche, but I will question authority, I will ask questions that challenge the norm. I will let students take the lead and just guide where needed. I will appreciate and value not just getting the job done but connecting with people and will help connect them to the larger picture of sustainability. Those are some of the softer things I will take with me but there are also many lessons related to the progressive projects and actions taken on campus in the field of sustainability that I will take with me and emulate where possible at CSUMB. We are all still on the same team, I'll just be playing on a different field.

What's been your favorite part of being sustainability director at UCSC? 
Supporting something larger than myself and doing so with such great people.

Lacey, you will be missed by your colleagues and sustainabilibuddies at UCSC, and we look forward to hearing about the great things you'll be doing in Monterey County!

Want to Help Prioritize Energy Conservation on Campus?

Attention UCSC undergrads living in an on-campus residential housing unit! PowerSave Campus would like your input on energy use in your housing unit. Please take the short 3 minute survey here and be sure to include your UCSC email address to be entered into a raffle for one $100 and 4 $50 bookstore gift certificates! The information collected in this survey will be used to help prioritize investment in energy conservation projects and programs. The deadline to participate is May 27th at midnight.

May 2015: Classes, Community and Training

The Homeslice CSA: Registration Now Open
The Pie Ranch in Pescadero is expanding their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) to include Santa Cruz and Davenport. As a CSA member, you will receive a weekly delivery of organically grown produce. You can either sign up for half a season for $312 or a full season for $600. The boxes come with vegetables, leafy greens, herbs, wheat flour or berries, dry beans, seasonal fruit and eggs available on request. Register to be a CSA here.

2nd Annual Transportation Festival: May 8
The Student Environmental Center's Transportation Campaign is hosting the 2nd Annual Transportation Festival on May 8th from 1 to 4 P.M. at the College Eight Upper Lawn. There will be activities, an open mic, a panel, and a drawing at this event! This is a great opportunity for students to learn more about sustainable transportation on and off campus.

PICA Garden Workdays: All Spring Quarter
Every Saturday from 10 A.M. - 2 P.M. the Program in Community and Agroecology (PICA) hosts garden workdays. Free vegetarian lunch will be served. Meet in the A-quad of the village.

Student Garden Market Cart: May 11
The next Student Garden Market Cart will be held Friday, May 15 from 12-1:30 P.M. in front of Science & Engineering library. PICA and other campus gardens will be handing out free produce from their gardens.

IDEASS at the Crepe Place
Three IDEASS teams—rainwater catchment, graphene synthesis, and the use of graphene filters for desalination—will be participating in the WISE meeting for Science On Tap, which happens monthly at the Crepe Place. Stop by on May 27th to hear their presentations and learn about the future of green technology! Check out the event page here.

Want to Live at PICA next year?
At the Program in Community and Agroecology, students grow organic food, share in community meals and learn sustainable living skills. Through PICA, students from a variety of majors have the opportunity to study agroecology and apply their knowledge to everyday activities within their community. If you are interested in a sustainability-themed housing for the 2015-2016 school year, sign up for the Village and mark "strongly prefer" for involvement in PICA.

Upcoming Common Ground Events
The mission of the Kresge Common Ground Center is to create cultural change for social justice, environmental regeneration, and economic viability. They act as a catalyst and facilitator of systemic change through undergraduate action-education, research, advocacy, and civic engagement. Common Ground is hosting a speaker series this quarter through their Collaborative Learning class and other events this spring. To find out more about the events, click here.

Free Pizza Coupon for Sustainable Move-Out Program Participation

For students living off campus there is barely enough time at the end of the academic year to let out a sigh of relief from finals before tackling your summer living situation. Many of us will be moving out of our current residence, and the less there is to pack-up and move, the better. So it seems like a win-win situation to lighten your load by discarding that old couch or creaky mattress on the curbside for someone else to deal with, right?

Besides the illegality of curbside dumping - for which tenants can be heavily fined by the city - the unfortunate reality is that many abandoned items end up in the surrounding forest and waterways, degrading the natural habitat of Santa Cruz. Fortunately, University Relations in partnership with the Sustainability Office is preventing forest litter by offering a stress-free summer move out services and FREE pizza!

The Move-Out program assists student households to collaborate with one another in holding multi-household garage sales over the weekend of May 30th-31st. This is in effort to divert usable household items from the landfill and surrounding natural habitat areas. Plus, each household to participate in the program will receive a coupon for a FREE large Woodstock’s pizza!

For furniture and other bulky household items that are at the end of their life cycle, and cannot otherwise be sold or donated for future use, the program will be offering a pickup day on June 27th in which items will be transferred for FREE to the city landfill, courtesy of Santa Cruz Resource Management services. Participants must register the items they would like to have picked up online at the city’s website. Examples of bulky items can include old mattresses, couches, desks, office chairs, coffee tables, all of which are at the end of their life cycle of use. Students participating in the bulky-item pick up day are also eligible for a Woodstock’s pizza coupon.

So let us assist you in your moving shenanigans while avoiding unwanted dumping fines, diverting waste from the landfill, and enjoying some FREE pizza! To participate in the multi-household garage sale visit the city website. Details on how to register for the bulky item pick-up can be found on the Move-Out Facebook page. If you have any further questions, you can contact Chris Kane, Sustainability Office Zero Waste Programs Manager, at chkane [at] ucsc [dot] edu or Christine West, University Relations Good Neighbor Intern, at cvwest [at] ucsc [dot] edu.

*Information and story contributed by Chris Kane, Sustainability Office's Zero Waste Team Coordinator