Marine Conservation Class Studies Water Conservation in Dorms

Students in Professor Don Croll's Marine Conservation class don't just learn about water conservation issues by reading studies--they design and implement their own studies. This fall, the focus of one team project in the course was Santa Cruz's local watershed and the relationship between students in the dorms and the water in our community. One student working on the project, Travis Trinh, shared with us what the project was about.

The purpose of the study was to support more sustainable use of freshwater on campus. He explains: "The reason we decided to focus on this subject was because Santa Cruz has been historically a very dry county. These past few years have had a marked decrease in average annual rainfall," he said. "This year alone has been one of the driest we've had in 5 years. Since the majority of our water comes from local watersheds, our water consumption is highly dependent on rainfall." The Campus Sustainability Plan for 2013-16 states that "Water delivered to the campus from the City of Santa Cruz comes entirely from local sources that are vulnerable to drought periods... UCSC uses about 6% of the total area water demand and serves as the largest single water customer in the city's water service area" (p. 20). According to a Santa Cruz Sentinel article from the end of 2013, Santa Cruz has a new low rainfall record of only around 5 inches of rainfall for the entire year--60 percent less than the previous record from 1929. No doubt we're in a serious drought.

Source: UCSC Campus Sustainability Plan 2013-16 (p. 20)

With very little rain, conserving water becomes even more important than most years. At UCSC, that means evaluating how to effectively reduce the amount of freshwater used in the residential dorms, which currently accounts for 49% of all UCSC main campus freshwater use (Campus Sustainability Plan 2013-16). To do so, the Marine Conversation class set up an experiment in the Crown and Stevenson dorms. Two buildings in each college had passive approaches, like flyers and posters, explaining how much water we consume each day and tips for reducing our water use. Two other buildings had a more active approach, shower timers that allowed students to time themselves in the shower voluntarily. Two other buildings had no passive or active treatments applied. Representatives from the project met with each college's residential advisers to explain the project and encourage them to talk to residents about it.

A poster in a Stevenson residential dorm from the Marine Conservation class project.

Travis explains: "Our hypothesis was that more direct approaches of sustainability (giving them shower timers) would influence a more positive behavioral change concerning freshwater sustainability. By measuring residential water consumption from month to month we discovered that there is evidence that when students are given tools to accomplish sustainable actions, there are more likely to do so. However, because we were working in such a short time frame (2 and a half weeks) we could not gather more substantial data."

Though the project was cut short by the length of the quarter system, Travis and other students in the class will be continuing the project in a more robust form in spring quarter 2014, partnering with other campus sustainability efforts. Drop Your Own Drip (DYOD) is another water conservation program on campus through the Student Environmental Center that uses mock water bills to demonstrate to students how much water they're using. Travis says he and his teammates are open to a partnership with DYOD if it makes sense logistically to combine efforts, and they are hoping to move ahead with planning this quarter.

Travis acknowledges that at UCSC, "water use has been reduced over the years to great effect, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying. Water is a valuable resource that is not infinite. This should be clear to everyone in California since Governor Brown just declared California to be in a state of drought emergency." We each have control over how much water we consume each day, and with projects like this and others on campus, we collectively have the power to encourage others to be more mindful of water use.

To learn more about the project, please email Travis at ttrinh2 [at] ucsc.edu

Green Revolving Loan Fund Established

A Green Revolving Loan Fund is being established at UCSC following the completion of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Sustainability Office and Colleges, Housing, and Educational Services (CHES) for the provision of an interest-free loan for the College 9/10 Bi-level Stairway Lighting Retrofit Project.

This project was used as the pilot project as an initial step in establishing the Green Revolving Loan Fund. It involves the replacement of 244 existìng interior stairwell light fixtures in the six Colleges 9/10 residential halls. Occupancy sensors will control the new light fixtures for maximum energy savings.

As part of the agreement, CHES will use the funds for this project and also agrees to pay 100% the loan back by June 2013, which will allow for these funds to be used to support future carbon reduction projects. For more information, please contact Lacey Raak.

Composting at the Colleges

Wondering how you can participate in reducing zero waste on campus in your living space?

Students in apartments can request a compost bucket, which they fill with cold composting food scraps and empty into bins near the recycling and landfill containers. Waste reduction teams empty the compost bins once a week and bring the food scraps to the garden. Go to fixit.ucsc.edu to request your compost bin right now!

Megan Taylor is a Waste Reduction Coordinator for Porter, Kresge, College 9, and College 10. Her job is to inform students about what to do with uncommon items that can be recycled like old electronics or batteries. "One main way that we’re helping to reduce waste on campus is through composting. I’ve been really excited with the amount of participation from residences so far."

Roughly 15% of all garbage at UCSC is food waste that could have been diverted from the landfill by composting (or by taking less food in the dining halls, at campus food vendors, and at campus events). Learn more here about our campus' commitment to reduce food waste by 5% this year by participating in the EPA's Food Recovery Challenge.

New Student Sustainability Advisor Positions in Colleges

For students living on campus, college life involves living, studying, and socializing in the college community they're affiliated with. In each of the housing areas, students produce waste and use resources in their day-to-day lives. At a campus where "environmental responsibility" is a part of our mission, UCSC colleges have created new Student Sustainability Advisor positions to support environmental responsibility on-the-ground.

"The SSA's primary role is to raise awareness and offer educational opportunities about ways campus residents can positively affect and contribute to UCSC’s sustainability goals," says Silas Snyder, Safety, Training and Conservation Coordinator for UCSC Housing and Dining Facilities.

Though many of the colleges are working toward zero waste goals, have gardens, or participate in composting, community life in the ten colleges at UCSC is about to get even greener, thanks to the new Student Sustainability Advisor (SSA) position that is currently open for applicants.

The SSAs will collaborate with campus sustainability leaders and residential life program staff and students to bring sustainability programs and awareness more to the forefront of residential life at UCSC. These student leaders will expand the team of people working on meeting the University's various conservation commitments, like the green house gas, landfill reduction, and water reduction goals. To learn more about the SSA position and find out how you can apply, please contact Silas Snyder or apply to ER #6782 the Employee Request System here.

Reduce, Reuse, Rejoice: Green Holiday Tips

The holidays are coming and along with the holiday cheer comes increased energy use, transportation and waste in general. During the holiday season, we may be scrambling to get out of our dorms and houses to head home. Once home we might rush to get a last minute ingredient or present. In your mad rush, don't forget about energy conservation and other wasteful habits that have an impact on our environment. Take only what you'll eat to avoid food waste at meals, consider the sources and life-cycle for gifts you buy, and consider buying less stuff! (watch the Story of Stuff). Here and below are some additional tips for going green this holiday as well as some sobering statistics to help motivate you to find ways to integrate sustainability into your holiday rituals.

Before you head home, remember: 

• There will be a planned electrical shutdown on campus and could be power outages over break, so remember to unplug all appliances, electronics, and shut off power strips. Be sure to empty mini-fridges, unplug, and leave the door ajar. 
• Close windows and blinds to prevent major heat and cool fluxes. 
• Empty trash and recycling in proper receptacles. 
• Please respect the campus closure dates. Our campus plans for energy savings during campus closures-- please help us keep our energy use down during those dates.

Once home: 

• Shut curtains and lower your blinds for extra insulation. 
• If you have a programmable thermostat and you'll be out of the house, turn it to 60 degrees. Keep it a little lower than you're comfortable with in short sleeves when you're home and supplement with layers and blankets. 
• Make sure to check faucets for leaks and tighten them before you leave your house for holiday or winter festivities 

Also remember that energy conservation is important year-round! If you would like to get involved in doing energy assessments and finding ways to reduce energy use on-campus, check out PowerSave Green Campus or the Green Office Certification Program if you'd like to have your office's waste and energy assessed.

Green Tip #5: Reduce Landfill Waste through Composting

Anyone who's been in one of the UCSC dining halls in recent years knows that dining services composts the food waste that you leave on your plate. Some dining halls, like the one at Colleges 9 and 10, make you scrape your own plates into the compostable bags that are sent to a commercial composting center. Others scrape your plates for you, but all of that food waste ends up being converted into nutrient rich compost.

But did you know that students in the dorms and apartments on campus can also compost the food scraps left over from meals they eat in their own rooms? Instead of sending the food waste to a commercial composting center, however, the food waste generated in dorms and apartments can be collected and added to a cold composting system that is used in the many gardens on campus. For information about each college's system, where to drop off your food waste, and who to contact for more information, please check out this PDF created by the UCSC Zero Waste Team.

If you have further questions about composting on campus, please contact Silas Snyder.

For those of you who do not live on campus or frequent the campus dining halls, you can compost at home! Santa Cruz County has a food scrapping to compost progam, and you can find out more about it here.

You can, of course, also have your own cold composting bin in your own backyard! To get started, check out the EPA's guide to composting, and be sure to search the internet and local libraries for other guides. YouTube has many video tutorials for how to compost. Composting is great because not only does it reduce landfill waste, but it also creates free nutrient rich compost for your own backyard!

June 2012 Sustainability Profile: Stevenson RA Class & Sustainability in the Dorms

Article by Melissa Ott

If you ever lived in a college dorm, was sustainability a topic your residential advisor often brought up? Most likely not, unless you lived in a sustainability themed house or had a particularly environmentally minded RA. Fortunately, this is changing here at UCSC, and has been in the process of changing for some time. Already, there are signs in most dorm bathrooms reminding residents to turn off the sink when brushing their teeth or to take shorter showers. Stickers are great, but what about the conversations that need to go along with them? RAs present the ideal candidate for starting those conversations in the dorm communities to create lasting change in students' consciousness and behavior regarding sustainable issues.

We spoke with Stevenson RA Sarah Cohen earlier this quarter about the RA class that she’s teaching with two other RAs; one of the topics of the course is sustainability, and we were interested in learning more about the role sustainability is playing in RA training and dorm life. All students who will be RAs in Stevenson College next year are in this class, which discusses other topics such as health and wellness, diversity and social justice, leadership, and which works to create a bond among this team of leaders in the Stevenson community.

Sustainability is part of the curriculum for the course for a couple of reasons. One of the Stevenson dorm buildings, Casa Segunda (discussed in May’s profile, as well), is a sustainability themed dorm, so it makes sense to discuss what sustainability means among those who will be living in this house and interacting with those living in this house. The House 2 lounge is filled with magazines and other resources related to living a more sustainable lifestyle, and the RAs in this house this year are active members of Path to a Greener Stevenson (PTAGS), an environmental group that meets in this house’s lounge on Thursdays from 8-9 PM. While students with a particular inclination toward sustainability can choose to live in this house, it’s important that students in all of the dorms be exposed to the issues, practices, and reasons surrounding sustainability. Not to mention it is great to have these conversations going on in classes in which leaders are learning how to lead by example and talk with residents about important life topics.

“Students form habits early in college,” Cohen remarked. She said that it’s important to talk about sustainable habits with the RAs who will be there with incoming freshman at the beginning of their college career and who can help influence good decision-making. A student’s first year can be defining in what kinds of habits follow them throughout their lives. For many, it’s the first time they’re independent from their families and making decisions without their parents checking on them.

If you haven't seen The Story of Stuff, take 20 minutes and watch it right now (or at least send yourself a reminder to watch it after work or class). This short film was the homework assignment due the day that the RA class talked about sustainable topics. It’s a “a 20-minute animation” that focuses on “the consumerist society" and “the way we make, use and throw away Stuff” (1). Cohen said the discussion went well that day in class when these issues were brought up and that it was exciting to talk about these issues with RAs who will be able to continue these conversations with their residents next year. During the class, they spent some time "thinking about where all of the stuff in a freshman dorm would come from and how to help students think about those things during move in and move out," she described.

These conversations generated tangible ways for RAs to encourage sustainable behavior in their houses next year. Some examples were reminding residents to turn off lights, creating a box in the lounge to hold old fliers to be used as scratch paper, and posting reminders in the bathrooms about reducing water use.

The class also did an activity during which students became more aware of their own environmental impact and resource use in their everyday routines. "You wake up and use your alarm, which uses electricity," Cohen gave as an example. "You take a shower, which uses water and energy to warm the water... In the dining hall, where does that food come from? Your daily routine impacts the world around you."


What are some ways that students in the dorms can be more conscious of their impact and take steps to reduce it? Post your ideas in the comments!

Sarah Cohen previously worked with the Sustainability Office’s Green Office Certification program, and she is currently working on The Sustainability Awareness Promotional Video about campus sustainability to share with incoming freshman and the UCSC campus. She is a third year studying Global Information and Social Enterprise Studies (GISES), an Intensive BA Degree in Sociology.

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Bibliography
1. The Story of Stuff website.

May 2012 Sustainability Profile: The Paper Towel Debate

Did you know that paper towel waste makes up 40% of the trash that UC Santa Cruz produces--by weight? Even if you didn’t know that, anyone who’s ever used a restroom stocked with paper towels knows how quickly those trash cans fill up with half-dry paper towels, which are often barely used to their maximum absorbency before another paper towel is pulled from the dispenser. We hardly think about it in our day-to-day lives, especially since many people use cloth hand towels at home. In the dorms at UCSC, however, paper towels are in every bathroom, and they are a huge contributor to campus waste.

Five years ago as a freshman in Stevenson College, Aidan Ward noticed the wastefulness of the dorm paper towel dispensers. Since then, he’s been working on getting the disposable towels removed and encouraging fellow students to bring their own cloth hand towels to the restroom. After years of various tactics, and now with the support of Path to A Greener Stevenson (PTAGS) and the Sustainability Office’s Zero Waste Team, paper towels have been removed from dorm restrooms in Stevenson’s Sustainability House (Casa Segunda) in the first phase of a pilot program aimed at removing all paper towels from residential dormitory restrooms on campus.

Sound like a shocking proposal? In fact, the paper towel debate is a hot topic among UC housing managers from across the state. On April 17, during the UC Housing System Facilities Summit at the University Center on the UCSC campus, a system-wide meeting of housing managers focused on sustainability initiatives. When Chris Attias, UCSC Director of Housing Services & Facilities, began discussing waste reduction and paper towels during his presentation on UCSC housing and sustainability topics, hands went up around the room with details about various UC campuses’ experiences with the paper towel waste issue.

Sanitation Concerns
The first question that arises in discussions about paper towels is why they’re there in the first place, and the answer is sanitation. A number of years ago, paper towels were installed in the UCSC dorm bathrooms to decrease the likelihood of people getting sick. Paper towels can help with sanitation because they get the germs off of your hands completely after washing, and both the paper towel and your germs end up in the trash. There’s also, of course, a convenience factor, but the main concern regarding their removal in the dorms for is sanitation.

A paper towel dispenser in a Stevenson Casa Cuarta restroom. You can see how full the trash bin next to it is with used paper towels. "These Come From Trees" signs are posted on many of the paper towel dispensers in dorm restrooms, but paper towel waste remains a huge contributor to overall campus waste.

Sanitation concerns are certainly not an unknown obstacle to Ward’s campaign to remove the paper towels. As a freshman, and again last year, Ward purchased used hand towels at thrift stores and hung them in bathrooms throughout the Stevenson dorms in hopes that students would use them instead of paper. He asked other RAs in Stevenson to tell their residents to wash the hand towel whenever they did laundry so that it would be washed regularly. Unfortunately, there was no way of knowing when the towel had last been washed, and there was a concern among students and staff that the towels weren’t being cleaned or were being contaminated with germs. So the towels were removed.

Why Not Compost?
One of the next questions that comes up regarding paper towel waste is, Why not compost them? As we just learned, paper towel waste is 40% of the waste stream by weight, which seems enormous since paper towels weigh so little. “It adds up,” remarked Silas Snyder, Safety, Training and Conservation Coordinator for UCSC Housing and Dining, after sharing this statistic during the UC housing managers meeting. The paper towels are compostable, but because of the large amount of them being thrown away, they will not break down. For compost to work, there has to be enough carbon-rich, wet material to break down the drier materials. On a small scale, this is possible to achieve, but there are just too many paper towels in the waste stream for this to work in the dorms.

Hand Dryers
What about hand dryers? This is one solution that Ward discussed with PTAGS, but the cost, noise, and energy-use were concerns that just didn’t make sense when paper towels could just be removed instead. At other campuses, hand dryers were actually piloted in one dorm bathroom, but because they’re noisy and so close to students’ living quarters, students in the pilot dorm were reluctant to use the dryer and requested that the paper towels be put back. A Sustainability Director at UC Davis actually researched the data on electric dryers versus paper towels, and found that if the paper towels were composted, they would have a smaller net carbon footprint. Additionally, dryers require maintenance, which adds to their overall cost.

Simplest Solution
The simplest solution seems to be to remove the paper towels. One of the UC housing managers mentioned that they simply do not have paper towels in their dorm bathrooms. Another housing manager from UC Davis said that they have lockers and cubbies in their restrooms, like the cubbies in UCSC dorms. Students can leave their personal toiletries and hand towels in these cubbies so they don’t have to remember to bring them with them. Even if students don’t have their cloth hand towel with them, as long as they wash their hands well, letting them air dry is another great solution. 

The Pilot Program
With the help of PTAGS, Ward submitted an official proposal for a pilot program, which was well-received by Sue Matthews, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Colleges, Housing and Educational Services, who expressed her concerns but has approved the initial phase to gather results on waste reduction and student and staff response. Changes such as this can cause pushback from custodial staff who stock and clean the dorm restrooms, but fortunately, Ward has been in communication with the Sustainability House custodian regarding the change and the steps required to measure the paper towel waste. So far the process has not generated any negative responses.

Two weeks ago, signs went up in the Sustainability House restrooms that read: 

A sign in one of the Sustainability House restrooms where paper towels have been removed as part of a pilot program to reduce paper towel waste and encourage students to think and behave more sustainably.

Paper towels are no longer being stocked in the Casa Segunda restroom dispensers, but a small stack is there in case of emergencies. PTAGS purchased a few hand towels for students who didn’t already have one, but other than that, students are expected to bring their own hand towel to the restroom or do without. Later in the quarter, PTAGS will conduct a survey for students to see how they feel about the change. Zero Waste Team member David Boyle has been active in working with PTAGS to obtain data from the waste generated from the Stevenson dorms, and he will continue to work on this project for the rest of the quarter. If all goes well with the pilot program, PTAGS plans to expand the project to all of the Stevenson dorms and, eventually, to the entire campus.

Hopefully the pilot program will be a success in Casa Seguna. It's fitting that the program begin in this house, since it's Stevenson's Sustainability house, "a house where events and community involvement tends toward creating a more sustainable college,” Ward remarked. He lives in this house as an RA, so he will be able to experience the paper towel removal project first-hand. “It’s all about encouraging students to adopt sustainable behaviors. Hopefully they’ll stick.”

Aidan Ward standing with a new sign in a Sustainability House dorm restroom. Only one stack of paper towels are being set out each week by custodial staff to encourage students to bring their own hand towels. The paper towels are there for emergency spills.

With the paper towel removal project and its future expansion possibilities to all of UCSC, sustainable behaviors such as using cloth hand towels in place of paper towels in the restroom will become a day-to-day reality for students in the dorms--and hopefully these sustainable behaviors will follow these students throughout their lives.

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Aidan Ward will be graduating this year with a bachelor’s degree in health science. His plans after UCSC include “playing music as much as possible” and attending medical school. We wish him the best of luck in his future, and we thank him for the great foundational work he’s done in making Stevenson, and UCSC, a more sustainable community.

This Sustainability Profile was written by Melissa Ott, Internship Coordinator Assistant and Newsletter Editor for the Campus Sustainability Office. If you know of a person or group on campus that you think we should profile, or if you would like to be profiled, please email Melissa.