Illinois Sustainable Technology Center • Prairie Research Institute
Author: Joy Scrogum
Joy is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), a division of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For over two decades, she has worked on pollution prevention, zero waste, sustainability planning, and outreach projects at ISTC, including the Great Lakes Regional Pollution Prevention Roundtable, Greening Schools, the Sustainable Electronics Initiative, the International Sustainable Electronics Competition, the Illini Gadget Garage, the Green Lunchroom Challenge, the Illinois Farm to Food Bank Project, and many more. https://www.linkedin.com/in/joyscrogum
The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biologyco-sponsor the Chambana Science Café, a monthly seminar series that brings scientists to the public to talk about their research in an informal setting. Seminars take place on the first Wednesday of every month at 5:30 p.m. at Pizza-M (208 W. Main Street in Urbana, IL), and there is free pizza while it lasts. The first meeting of the semester will be next week on September 2, with a presentation by Sarah Brown-Schmidt, associate professor of psychology at Beckman Institute.
As noted in this article, the Gadget Garage will open to the general campus community for repair assistance on Monday, September 14. Fall hours will be Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 2 to 6 p.m.
Professors Martin Wolske and William Bullock are also teaching courses associated with the Gadget Garage, with classes beginning this week. Professor Bullock’s class is a multidisciplinary effort with the following course objectives:
Collaborate with peers from business, design & technology in planning and startup
Experience project management, leadership and team building
Create a business and marketing plan to insure success going forward
Plan and implement new branding, advertising and wayfinding strategies
Participation in the iFixit Technical Writing Project (a unique portfolio piece)
Knowledge to create more sustainable designs and extend product life cycles
Professor Bullock is particularly interested in having students with interests in marketing and engineering participate alongside their peers from industrial design. A few seats are still available; interested students should see the course flyer and contact Professor Bullock directly with questions. Professor Wolske’s Introduction to Network Systems class will be meeting in the Gadget Garage space, and students will have opportunities to work on service learning projects associated with this project for the course.
See the Illini Gadget Garage page on the Sustainable Electronics Initiative web site for more information on the courses and the project itself, including a map of its location. General questions can be addressed to Joy Scrogum.
Photo by Joyce Seay-Knoblauch. Pictured (left to right): William Bullock, professor of industrial design, Joy Scrogum, coordinator of the Sustainable Electronics Initiative, and Martin Wolske, research scientist and adjunct faculty member in library and information science.
ISTC recently completed a retrofit of lighting at its headquarters building in Champaign, with assistance from UI Facilities and Services. All T12 fluorescent light fixtures and exits signs have been upgraded to T8s and LEDs. Altogether, the changes are expected to save 160,000 kWhs annually.
T12 lamps are being phased out nationally due to changes in federal energy standards which are meant to encourage improved efficiency at commercial and industral facilities. See Fluorescent Light Standard Changes and Lighting Answers: T8 Fluorescent Lamps for more information on these changes and the comparisons between the two types of lamps. According to the Ameren Illinois Act on Energy program, switching from T12 fixtures to high-performance T8 or T5 lamps and an electronic ballast could result in savings of 33% or more on your electricity bills each year.
If your business is interested in a lighting retrofit to T8 or T5 lamps or LEDs in order to increase efficiency and cut costs, you can apply for cash incentives for your project via the Act on Energy program. Visit the Lighting Incentives page on the Act on Energy web sitefor application information and assistance with identifying a contractor in your area.
Members of the UI sustainable electronics campus consortium and other interested parties are invited to attend a meeting at 11:30 AM on Wednesday, Aug. 5th at ISTC to learn more about and discuss the Illini Gadget Garage project. The project team will be meeting to discuss current progress (location, classes to be associated with the project, etc.) and next steps. Anyone interested in learning more or providing feedback is welcome to attend. Feel free to bring lunch along with you. Because this meeting will involve a group discussion, rather than formal presentations, it will not be simultaneously broadcast as a webinar.
Funded by the Student Sustainability Committee, this project involves the establishment of a collaborative repair center on campus for student and staff-owned electronic devices. See our previous post on the project for further information. For those unable to attend, minutes will be posted to the Sustainable Electronics Initiative (SEI) web site. At any time, please feel free to contact Joy Scrogum with any questions about the project, or to discuss ways to become involved. A page devoted to the project will be added to the SEI web site in the near future.
Photo by jfcherry on flickr. CC by 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, food production represents 10 percent of the total US energy budget, uses 50 percent of US land, and accounts for 80 percent of the freshwater we consume–yet, 40 percent of food in the US goes uneaten. And in 2013, 49.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, including 33.3 million adults and 15.8 million children. Food waste is clearly both a tremendous problem and opportunity for improving the sustainability of our society. Reducing food waste in schools not only helps to ensure those precious expended resources are providing nutrition as intended, but also provides the opportunity to set important examples of conservation and systems thinking among our impressionable youth, which will hopefully stay with them as they become our next generation of leaders.
The Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) is therefore pleased to announce an exciting new project that addresses this important societal and environmental challenge. In order to identify sources of food waste in K-12 schools and facilitate its prevention and reduction, ISTC, in collaboration with the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), UI Extension, and Beyond Green Partners, Inc., is launching the Green Lunchroom Challenge this fall. Funded by US EPA Region 5, the program is open for participation from K-12 schools throughout the state. Marketing of the program will however, be targeted toward underserved regions of southern Illinois, including Pulaski, Alexander, Marion, White, and Fayette counties. According to data from the ISBE, over 70 percent of K-12 students in those counties are eligible for assistance through the National School Lunch Program. By preventing and reducing food waste in these areas particularly, and throughout the state, it is hoped the Challenge will not only achieve environmental benefits, but also stretch federal and state assistance and resources through increased efficiency.
Photo: USDA Blog
Similar to the successful Illinois Green Office Challenge, the Green Lunchroom Challenge is a voluntary, “friendly competition,” in which participating schools will choose among a variety of suggested activities to improve the sustainability of their food service. These activities will range in complexity and commitment to allow participants to best suit their situation, budget, and available community resources. Examples might include, but not be limited to, composting of food scraps, use of creative entree names and careful relative placement of food choices to reduce waste of fruit and vegetables, donation of unused food to local food banks or shelters, etc. In addition to operationally related activities, schools may also choose to integrate food waste prevention and reduction into curricula, helping students learn about food security and hunger, composting, the circular economy, and stewardship. Resources and guidance will be available on the project web site and from ISTC technical assistance staff for each recommended activity, and participants will earn points for every activity they complete. Relative progress will be displayed on an online leaderboard. On Earth Day 2016, the participating public K-12 school with the most points will be declared the winner for the year and will receive public recognition and a prize (to be determined) to foster continuous improvement.
A kickoff workshop will be held in September 2015 (date and location to be announced) to introduce the Challenge; identify (in part through feedback from school and district representatives in attendance) key sources of food waste in schools, as well as barriers to its prevention; to raise awareness among potential participants of existing relevant toolkits and programs; and to provide comprehensive training on analysis and modification of menus, food procurement and inventory, lunchroom procedures, etc. Note that a school does not need to participate in the workshop to participate in the Challenge, and schools may register throughout the Challenge period (Sept. 1, 2015- April 1, 2016). While the competition is only open to K-12 schools in Illinois, ISTC hopes that other states and organizations beyond schools will be able to use resources developed for the Challenge to guide food waste reduction and prevention in their operations and regions.
Interested parties may contact Joy Scrogum with questions or to request addition to the mailing list for more information on the workshop and activities as it becomes available. The project web site will be available soon, and potential participants will be able to sign up to receive further information there as well. (The URL for the program web site will be posted in the comments of this post as soon as it is live.)
Photo by Tim Lauer, principal of Meriwether Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Oregon
Back in 2013, ISTC Emerging Technologies Resource Specialist and current SEI Coordinator, Joy Scrogum, and ISTC Affiliated Faculty Scientist, William Bullock, served as guest editors for a special issue of the journal Challenges, entitled “Electronic Waste–Impact, Policy and Green Design.”
The journal’s editors recently received multiple requests to reopen this special issue. Scrogum and Bullock have once again agreed to serve as editors.
From the issue’s rationale:
“Electronics are at the heart of an economic system that has brought many out of poverty and enhanced quality of life. In Western society in particular, our livelihoods, health, safety, and well being are positively impacted by electronics. However, there is growing evidence that our disposal of electronics is causing irreparable damage to the planet and to human health, as well as fueling social conflict and violence.
While global demand for these modern gadgets is increasing, policy to handle the increased volumes of electronic waste has not kept pace. International policy governing safe transfer, disposal, reclamation, and reuse of electronic waste is nonexistent or woefully lacking. Where laws do exist about exporting and importing hazardous waste, they are routinely circumvented and enforcement is spotty at best. While European Union countries lead the way in responsible recycling of electronic and electrical devices under various EU directives, most industrialized nations do not have such policies. In the U.S., for example, most electronic waste is still discarded in landfills or ground up for scrap.
It is imperative that we consider how green design practices can address the growing electronic waste problem. This special issue is meant to do just that and spur discussions on how electronic products can become greener and more sustainable.”
If you are interested in submitting a paper for this special issue, please send a title and short abstract (about 100 words) to the Challenges Editorial Office at challenges@mdpi.com, indicating the special issue for which it is to be considered. If the proposal is considered appropriate for the issue, you will be asked to submit a full paper. Complete instructions for authors and an online submission form for the completed manuscripts are available on the Challenges web site at http://www.mdpi.com/journal/challenges/special_issues/electronic-waste#info. The deadline for manuscript submissions is December 31, 2015.
This post originally appeared on the Sustainable Electronics Initiative blog on 6/19/15. You may subscribe to the SEI blog via email, and learn more about sustainable electronics issues on the SEI web site.
The Illinois Sustainable Technology Center and the Sustainable Electronics Initiative (SEI) are pleased to announce that a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign consisting of SEI coordinator Joy Scrogum (ISTC), William Bullock (Art + Design), Martin Wolske, and Jon Gant (both of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science) has recently received funding from the Student Sustainability Committee for a project entitled “Illini Gadget Garage: Education through Electronic Product Life Extension.”This seed funding will be used to launch a center where UI students and staff will bring their personal electronic devices for assistance with assessment and repair. The center will be called the Illini Gadget Garage. Using the same “collaborative repair” model employed at the campus bike shop and MakerSpace Urbana’s computer Help Desk, clients with devices in need of repair/troubleshooting will work together with Gadget Garage student staff and volunteers to perform the necessary device assessment and maintenance activities. Depending upon the situation, activities may range from guidance on how to make your computer/device run faster to actual repair and replacement of components.
Beyond the avoidance of waste by extending the useful life of products, desired outcomes for students, staff, and the community include:
Hands on experiences for UI students, not only in terms of performing repairs, but also in process documentation and fostering sustainable behavior on a larger scale through the iFixit Technical Writing Project; marketing and business operations; lessons in industrial design for repair and recyclability; and in environmental education and communication.
Increased awareness of electronics laws and recycling options.
Increased awareness of sustainability issues surrounding electronic products throughout their lifecycles.
Decreased misconceptions regarding the disposability of devices and prohibitive complexity of electronics repair and maintenance.
Contribution to the overall efforts to make ours a more sustainable campus with a reduced carbon footprint.
The project team will use SEI’s Sustainable Electronics Campus Consortiumas an advisory group, providing input and feedback on project progress and development. The project is just getting started, but there will be more information on the SEI web site and posted here on the blog over the coming months. In the meantime, if you have questions or want to be added to the campus consortium list so you can become involved in meetings on this and other relevant efforts, please contact Joy Scrogum.
Several upcoming training opportunities are available for those interested in zero waste, specifically the reduction of waste in food service operations.
As defined by EPA, sustainable materials management (SMM) is “a systemic approach to using and reusing materials more productively over their entire lifecycles. It represents a change in how our society thinks about the use of natural resources and environmental protection. By examining how materials are used throughout their lifecycle, an SMM approach seeks to:
Use materials in the most productive way with an emphasis on using less;
Reduce toxic chemicals and environmental impacts throughout the material life cycle;
Assure we have sufficient resources to meet today’s needs and those of the future.”
The Food Waste Reduction Alliance (FWRA) is a collaborative project of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (representing food and beverage companies), the Food Marketing Institute (representing food retailers), and the National Restaurant Association (representing the food service industry), working to reduce food waste generation, increase food donations to the needy, and to divert unavoidable food waste from landfills through recycling.
In addition to the webinar overview of the FWRA, there will be a series of free webinars to guide users through the waste assessment and reduction process presented in the Reducing Wasted Food & Packaging Toolkit (available at http://www.epa.gov/foodrecovery/tools/). All are welcome to participate. The schedule for that series is below. Click on a webinar title to register online.
US EPA Region 9 is also inviting food service facilities (restaurants, cafeterias, grocers, and other commercial and institutional kitchens) in California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and the Pacific Islands to pilot the toolkit. Along with the free webinar series, pilot participants are offered one-on-one technical assistance from an EPA team member; the opportunity to participate in peer groups to troubleshoot the tracking process; the chance to present in future EPA webinars; and the ability to jumpstart or enhance participation in the EPA’s Food Recovery Challenge. Learn more about the opportunity to pilot the Reducing Wasted Food & Packaging Toolkit at http://go.usa.gov/MuGA.
Questions can be directed to Amanda Hong at hong.amanda@epa.gov. Thanks to Amanda for sharing information on these opportunities.
The MREA Solar Training Academy is a series of weekend classes that will walk students through the photovoltaic (PV) design and installation process. The format of the Solar Training Academy will be MREA’s class progression that will include Basic Photovoltaics, PV Site Assessor, Intermediate PV, PV Design Lab and PV Sales and Finance. Classes will be held one weekend each month beginning in January and concluding in early May. Topics of this training will cover PV equipment selection, utility intertied and battery based systems, batteries, mechanical and electrical integration, PV design, PV residential site assessment, National Electric Code, system commissioning, solar financials. Participation in the Solar Training Academy will also include opportunities to meet with professionals in the solar industry.
Upon successful completion of the Solar Training Academy, students will qualify for:
Sit for the MREA PV Site Assessor Exam (To sit for the MREA PV Site Assessor Exam, students will need to complete two practice site assessments outside of class.)
The course instructor is Alex Jarvis, of Solar Systems of Indiana.
Non MREA Member Price = $2,200.00; MREA Member Price = $2,000.00.
A new certificate program from the University of Washington will help chemists, environmental and sustainability professionals, health and safety professionals and product managers make informed product decisions that take into account sustainability, toxicity and human health concerns. The certificate in Green Chemistry & Chemical Stewardship will be offered through the Professional and Continuing Education program at the University of Washington.
There will be three online courses in the certificate, and individuals can sign up for a single course on a space available basis:
The online certificate program is intended to give professionals working in chemicals management experience using comparative chemical hazard assessment tools for product selection. The classes will be offered sequentially, beginning in January, 2015, and concluding in August, 2015. Students will complete a capstone project requiring them to evaluate a chemical or product within a sustainability framework.
