Goats Get to Work on Campus

UGA just got a few new furry additions - and they're not just here to be cute!

Six goats now live in a fenced-in pen beside Hull Street parking deck, and two more are coming soon. The goats are known as the Tanyard Creek Chew Crew and are part of a student-run project funded by a 2012 sustainability grant. They'll be living near Hull Street deck for the next six weeks, and during that time will be munching their way through invasive plant species such as privet and English Ivy - a removal tactic known as prescribed grazing.

Zach Richardson, a senior landscape architecture major at UGA, developed the idea for the Chew Crew project. Students and professors from the Warnell School of Forestry and the College of Environment and Design are also involved in the project, and two photography students and three English students will be documenting the goats' progress each week with photos and videos. A time lapse camera installed on Hull Street Deck will also document the change in vegetation of the area during the duration of the project. Signs along the fence help educate passersby who might wonder, "where did these goats come from?"

The goats have lots of room to roam (and plenty of plants to eat) along Tanyard Creek, and even have a shelter to retreat to when it rains. The shelter was constructed by Chris McDowell, a master of landscape architecture student (and another sustainability grant recipient!). It's great for the goats and sustainable too - McDowell used only salvaged materials to build it.

But the goats can't do it all on their own - the project needs help from students too! Work days are held every Wednesday from 3:30 - 6 p.m., during which volunteers will help remove invasive plant species from the area. Students from a College of Environment and Design class are planning an interactive Goat Day on Saturday, April 14 (the day of the G-Day game). Students and visitors will be able to see the goats and learn more about their work on campus. More events are in the works, so check back for details, and until then, be sure to stop by on Wednesdays to volunteer or pay the goats a visit on your way to class!

-Katie Valentine

light fixture replacements

                  Everywhere you go now most days there is artificial lighting, whether you’re inside or outside, and often times these lights go unnoticed by your everyday activity on campus.  Next time you go into a class room look up and count how many light fixtures are in the room, and then close your eyes and think of how many rooms like the one you are sitting in are on campus, hundreds maybe thousands of rooms all over campus.  It is sometimes mind blowing how much energy we use so nonchalantly. 

                  This has been a note of the UGA Office of Sustainability and Physical Plant for some time now.  They have worked tirelessly over the past few years analyzing different rooms on campus for their energy usage and lighting.  In order to mitigate light waste and energy waste on campus the Physical Plant has been removing and replacing old light fixtures on campus with more energy efficient fluorescent light fixtures.  The number of replacements on campus currently is too numerous to count but the Office of Sustainability and the Physical Plant have teamed up to try and tackle the feat of accounting for every fixture replacement. 

                  The reason behind this project of recording light infrastructure change is to catalog the mitigation of energy use for the purpose of tax rebates.  GA Power is offering rebates for every watt of energy we don’t use any more and replacing light fixtures is a good place to start.  There have not been any early projections on the amount of rebates we will receive but the Office of Sustainability and Physical Plant still remain confident that this will contribute to a large chunk in our multimillion dollar electric bill every year.

RecycleMania Competition Off to a Great Start

You’ve seen the posters around campus, watched students take photos “green-handed” with Hairy Dawg, and maybe even dug through trash on East Campus last week. So what’s this all about?


For the past three weeks, UGA has been competing in the 12^th annual RecycleMania,  a competition that promotes waste reduction in campuses across North America. UGA is competing against 604 schools in the U.S. and Canada in five categories. Each category is measured differently, but the main goal of RecycleMania is to reduce the total amount of waste each university produces and to raise awareness about the importance of recycling on campus.

And since the start of RecycleMania, the Office of sustainability and students, faculty and staff at UGA have been doing just that.

Students got “caught green-handed” at the kickoff on Feb. 10, where they posed with Hairy Dawg and made the pledge to reduce, reuse and recycle more on campus.

They stayed up late to street paint in Tate Plaza - a must when spreading the word about an event at UGA!

And last week, Office of Sustainability staff and student volunteers participated in a waste audit on East Campus, where they sorted through 373 pounds of waste material from from the Ramsey Center, the Hugh Hodgson School of Music and The Lamar Dodd School of Art. Out of those 373 pounds, 89 were saved from the landfill and sent to the recycling center. Check out this story from Grady Newsource:

But RecycleMania is far from over - we still have more than a month to go in this eight-week competition! Be sure to check UGA's RecycleMania Facebook page for competition updates. Our next event will be a screening of the film "Bag It" on March 20 at 7 p.m. in the Rooker Hall Fireside Lounge. 

And of course, even if you can't make it to the events, you can participate in RecycleMania by recycling paper, cardboard, plastic and glass in bins throughout campus and by cutting back on your usage of un-recyclable material such as Styrofoam. So keep reducing, reusing and recycling, UGA!

 

Every Watt Counts

Every Watt Counts

Dana Schroeder, the president of S.E.A. and new office intern, and I are currently working on the Office of Sustainability’s newest energy conservation campaign dubbed Every Watt Counts.  This campaign includes a pledge that students, faculty, and staff can take to show their dedication to conserving energy throughout the campus.  We decided to couple the Every Watt Counts campaign with our already successful campaign of Every Drop counts for this semester.

The campaign started October 17^th and will end at the end of November, just before exams.  The campaign has gone well so far with only a few minor setbacks mainly from concern about how the buildings within the program will be compared once the data on energy use is collected. 

The program contains 14 buildings around campus, from Dance to Poultry Science.  We decided to use two different strategies in order to see how much of an effect the pledge campaign had on energy and water use.  So far we have over 400 pledges from students, faculty, and staff from the 7 buildings in the pledge campaign.  If you see a pledge banner for Every Watt Counts or Every Drop Counts in your building please consider taking the pledge. 

-Will Grant

Ending Hunger, One Bike at a Time

 Hello, my name is Jack Spalding. I am currently interning with Campus Kitchens at UGA, in conjunction with the UGA Office of Sustainability. Campus Kitchens is a unique student-run program, which currently has chapters at many other universities around the nation. It is a food recovery program with the goal of alleviating local hunger. Campus Kitchens is currently providing weekly meal deliveries to senior citizens, specifically grandparents raising grandchildren, and senior citizens who need home delivered meals. The meals that are provided to them come from many different sources, such as the food bank, the Ugarden, and a handful of restaurants in the Athens area. Currently, I am working on making our deliveries more sustainable, through the implementation of a bicycle-cart program, with the help of Campus Kitchens coordinator Sarah Jackson, Kate Munden-Dixon who came up with the bike-cart idea, and Fred Smith of Bike Athens. Our goal is to be able use modified bicycles to pick up unused food from restaurants around Athens, as well as some sororities and fraternities on Milledge Ave. Fred Smith has already built a few prototypes of the bikes, and they all are extremely innovative and practical. The bike model which we have decided to use, is essentially an extended version of a standard mountain bike, with two ten-gallon tubs attached to the back of the bike, on either side of the back wheel. The benefits of using bicycles are many, as they do not necessitate the use motor vehicles, and they will also make our program more visible when we are seen riding around town. We have been in communication with many restaurants around town, and some such as Subway, Jimmy Johns, and Big City Bread have already told us that they would love to donate their unused food to our bike-cart pick ups. We hope to add a few more restaurants to this list, and plan to start the pick ups sometime in the next two weeks. As well as helping with the bike-cart program, I have been working out at the student-run Ugarden every Wednesday morning. Through our help out at the garden, which is located on South Milledge, past the loop, Campus Kitchens is able to harvest vegetables which we in turn also deliver to the seniors in need. Also, this upcoming Friday, on October 7th, Shannon Wilder, Sarah Jackson, and Nik Heynen will be speaking at the First Friday Eats at the East Campus Dining Hall. They will be discussing hunger in Athens and how Campus Kitchens and Athens Urban Food Collective are striving to end local hunger. If you are interested, this is a great way to learn more about problems such as this, and how to get involved. First Friday Eats occurs on the first Friday of each month and is a “green bag” bring your own lunch series which focuses on different topics pertaining to sustainability in our community. We will likely be needing bicycle “drivers” in the coming weeks, so if you have any interest or questions regarding the bike-cart program, feel free to email me at spalding@uga.edu.

On Your Marks, Get Set, Conserve!

The UGA Green Cup kick off took place yesterday evening, marking the beginning of a month long competition between the Hill Community. The kick off was sponsored by Papa John’s who generously donated 50 pizzas to the cause. Students wandered over for the potential Sunday night meal and stayed for the Green Cup information. They saw how they can earn points for their hall and ways to conserve in their dorms and in general.

For those that do not yet know about the Green Cup and the events that it entails, it is a competition to reduce overall energy, waste, and water use. Waste will be determined through random waste audits where participants will help determine proportionally how many recyclables were thrown in the trash, while water and energy use will be scored in comparison to previous years. Students earn points for their hall by working towards these goals, but also by attending Green Cup events and learning more about ways to save. At the end of the competition, points will be tallied and the winner will be announced at the final celebration, and awarded the infamous Green Cup!

Green Cup events will take place once a week throughout the 4 week span of the competition. The next event is an outdoor film screening of “Bag It” on the lawn between Boggs and Church Residence Halls on Tuesday, September 20th at 8:30 pm. The film aims to educate and inspire students to participate in the competition, as well as the greater UGA community, on the importance of sustainable action. Popcorn will be provided! These events are hosted by the UGA Office of Sustainability.

For more information and updates on events, LIKE the “UGA Green Cup” facebook page.

Chiara Gustafson, Blog Author
Office of Sustainability Intern

Palliating the Paradox of Plenty

One of the best things about living and working in Athens and the University of Georgia community is the vast web of relationships and connections available to you. If you have a project idea you want to make happen or even an issue to iron out, there is almost definitely a department, organization, student group, or professor that has the resource you need. All you have to do is simply reach out.

While enrolled in a Women’s Studies Service-Learning class this past spring, I got the opportunity to help develop a project that will eventually, after stacks of applications and paperwork, be established as an official Campus Kitchen. The Campus Kitchens Project, a national nonprofit organization, is geared towards combining the ingenuity of college students with hunger needs in their community via unused food in their on-campus dining halls and local food establishments. However, until it acquires its national affiliation, the UGA organization is referred to as the Campus-Community Kitchen.

Typically, Campus Kitchens Projects across the country partner with their schools’ food services programs to collect excess dining hall food and then use the kitchens after hours for sorting and cooking. They then deliver the prepared foods that would be otherwise thrown out to community residents in need. However, since UGA Food Services already donates its excess food to another local nonprofit, the student group developing the Campus-Community Kitchen chose to pursue the many other sources of food waste to close in on the gap in hunger in Athens-Clarke County.

At UGA, the Campus-Community Kitchen partners with the Athens Community Council on Aging’s Grandparents Raising Grandchildren program. In a survey administered to program members, 78% of respondents indicated that they did not have enough food most of the time. Therefore, the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren program seemed a perfect fit for the Campus-Community Kitchen.

Furthermore, Athens-Clarke County has the highest rate of poverty of any county in the United States with at least one-hundred thousand residents. The 21% food insecurity rate in Athens-Clarke County is significantly higher than the 16.6% national rate; moreover, Georgia is ranked 6th in the nation for senior hunger. As defined by the USDA, food insecurity includes the increased intake of foods of reduced nutritious value, variety, or desirability, like fast food or highly processed foods instead of fresh fruits and vegetables and lean protein. In addition, it could also include less than adequate overall food intake.

And then an opportunity for a unique relationship formed. Students working on development of the Campus Kitchens Project approached the campus community garden (UGArden) leaders about the possibility of a partnership. Since UGArden was already committing their excess produce to the Athens Area Food Bank, the partnership with Campus Kitchens only seemed natural. Once a month, UGArden would harvest enough produce for the number of families that Campus Kitchens would be delivering to, typically around fifteen.

UGArden is the only student-run cooperative CSA (community-supported agriculture) vegetable garden on the UGA campus. Centered on sustainable agriculture and building community, students and other community members plant, weed, and harvest produce biweekly.

Furthermore, UGArden’s produce donations to the Food Bank are expected to incorporate into a credit program for Campus-Community Kitchen. So in return for UGArden produce, the Campus-Community Kitchen will be able to purchase other staple items from the Food Bank that they were not able to receive from the current sources. So far this summer, Campus Kitchens has banked 283 pounds of produce from UGArden that they may be able to use for other items.

UGA’s project also collects food that would be otherwise wasted from various local grocery stores, restaurants, and during the school year, fraternity and sorority houses. With summer in session and school out, the Campus-Community Kitchen has shifted from prepared meals to mostly produce from UGAarden accompanied by easy vegetable recipes as well as other pre-prepared bread and treats from local restaurants.

Since the project’s inaugural three-day collection, preparation, and delivery process the week of March 28, 2011, the program revved up to a bimonthly delivery in June. Plans are in the works to making the deliveries weekly and ultimately a few times per week. The Campus-Community Kitchen’s leadership is in the process of submitting the final portion of the application at some point this week and hope to be affiliated as an official Campus Kitchen by the Fall 2011 semester.

This week, Campus Kitchens will be delivering jalapeno peppers, serrano peppers, bell peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, squash, and zucchini to Campus Kitchen families. UGArden also had extra tomato and pepper plants which were delivered to Campus-Community Kitchen food recipients who indicated they would like to raise some of their own produce. And thus a mutually beneficial, tummy-filling, and community-strengthening partnership was formed.