Green Lunchroom Challenge to Assist IL Schools with Food Waste Prevention, Reduction

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.

 

school kids in cafeteria
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.)

 

cafeteria tray
Photo by Tim Lauer, principal of Meriwether Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Oregon

 

Student-Staff Leadership Boosts U of I Campus Recycling Record

QuadRecyclingImprovementsSMPeople at the University of Illinois who care about recycling think about changing human behavior. They wonder how to make the distinction between the landfill bin and the recycle bin so convenient and so obvious that even the most stressed and preoccupied student hits the right target. At the Champaign-Urbana campus, zero-waste is a serious commitment. It is included as a component of the Illinois Climate Action Plan which obligates the U of I to achieving carbon neutral status by 2050. Read more on recycling improvements.

Illini Gadget Garage Project Will Extend Useful Life of Student and Staff Electronics

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 Consortium as 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.

SSC_Logo

 

This post originally appeared on the Sustainable Electronics Initiative Blog on 6/24/15. You may subscribe to the SEI blog via email, and learn more about sustainable electronics issues on the SEI web site. You may also make a donation via the U of I Foundation to support this and other SEI educational efforts.  

Zero Waste at International Symposium

compost bin in the foreground with conference patrons using compostable cups for coffee in the background
An example of one of the ISMS break rooms and the compost bins.

ISTC’s Zero Waste Illinois program helped make the 70th annual International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy a zero waste event. They symposium hosted 500+ guests this week (June 22-26, 2015) on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ISTC made it possible for 100% of all waste from symposium break rooms to be diverted from landfill to compost. ISTC provided compost bins, liners and signage and the conferences organizers provided serving ware that can be composted. ISTC is also providing labor to collect the compost and take it to Landscaping Recycling Center in Urbana, IL.

 

If you are interested in hosting a zero waste event or making your office more sustainable please contact Bart Bartels. ISTC also offers free site visits to assess zero waste opportunities for businesses, manufacturing, government, and other organizations.

ISTC Laboratories Contribute to Biomedical Breakthrough

CNParticlemeasurement260

Labs at ISTC participated in a biomedical breakthrough by Beckman Institute faculty who developed a fast and inexpensive way to produce carbon nanoparticles. Measurements by John Scott, ISTC senior chemist, helped demonstrate that the particles can carry payloads of pharmaceutical drugs for targeted medical treatments.

 

Scott used one of the Center’s state-of-the-art instruments that can simultaneously measure fluorescence and absorbance of carbon nanoparticles. The work required extreme sensitivity in the parts per billion range.  More on the nanoparticle breakthrough.

 

 

College, University Recyclers Set the Stage for Generation ‘Green’

Multi-bin recycling is a key to zero-waste strategies.
ISTC’s Zero Waste Program is innovating on the University of Illinois campus as a partner of student and administration leadership

College and university administrators going to the Illinois Recycling Association’s (IRA) June workshops for higher education will be inspired by the great ideas included on The Best Colleges dot org website.

ISTC is one of the sponsors of two training workshops for Illinois colleges and universities on planning, audits, analyzing data and other issues. Kennedy-King College will host a workshop for the City College of Chicago from 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. Wednesday, June 10. The deadline to register is June 10. Illinois Central College will be the site of the second workshop from 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. Wednesday, June 17. (Meet in the morning at nearby Embassy Suites, East Peoria.)  The deadline for that one is June 12. The East Peoria workshop is conveniently scheduled the day before the IRA/ILCSWMA/SWANA Annual Joint Conference. For more information and to register, visit http://www.illinoisrecycles.org/events/2015-conference/pre-conference-college-seminars/.

As far as hip green universities go, we can all envy UC Davis’ commitment to zero-waste, which they plan to achieve by 2020. They have had their version of the U of I’s ‘Dump and Run’ since 1975. Such programs allow students to ‘donate’ good stuff they don’t want to take home and sell it back to other students next semester.

Maine’s College of the Atlantic is another beacon of greenness, where students recycling enterprise is ubiquitous.  It is easy to recycle on campus and reportedly, no pizza crusts ever escape the compost bins.

Here in Illinois, take notes from Loyola University Chicago, which is featured in the latest One Billion Gallon Water Challenge Research Update. Faculty, students and staff there are the focus of experiments to improve water conservation behavior on campus. Their goal is to save up to three million gallons of water a year. They are designing a Resource Tool Kit to share their results with other Illinois colleges and universities.

Talk about student leadership of the green hue, it is hard to beat the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where year’s ago students voted to charge themselves a Sustainability Fee. Since then the Student Sustainability Committee has used the fee to drive green initiatives in many fruitful directions. Read here some recent results of their leadership.

 

 

 

 

Eco-heroes, Bargain Hunters Need Apply

4-yard-dumpsterTechnophiles, fashionistas and Earth Citizens take note: Volunteers at the University YMCA’s 2015 Dump & Run get exclusive, first dibs on the quality clothing, electronics and other cool stuff that students tend to chuck, not carry, at year’s end.

 

At the spring Dump & Run the YMCA accepts good stuff that they don’t want in dumpsters and sells them cheap to returning students in August.

 

The YMCA needs volunteers to collect and sort contributions May 11-16 and May 18-22 and May 25-29. Volunteer six hours or more and you get your pick of the mechandise in the fall.

ISTC for the Gold!

Certified Green Office Program logoBobby Knight – 1984 U.S.A. men’s Olympic basketball coach – said,

“The key is not the will to win. Everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.”

This statement is very true for the staff at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center.  They not only want the world to be sustainable, they are willing to prepare for a sustainable future and create new ways to be more sustainable.  Some examples include their efforts on Zero Waste Illinois and their research on innovative ways to mitigate emerging contaminants. Continue reading “ISTC for the Gold!”

Three Tips on the Road to a Great Governor’s Award Application

TrophyPath2If your organization has done a lot in the name of sustainability – from projects that save money and resources to initiatives that strengthen the people and communities you work for – what are you waiting for? The Governor’s Sustainability Award provides a great opportunity for you to pull all of your sustainability work together into a single document: Your award application!

 

Because sustainability encompasses the triple bottom line – People, Planet, Profit – it can be tough to wrap one’s brain around all that should be included in your application. Our How To Apply page and FAQ’s will help you in that process, but we know that’s a lot to read! Here are three tips to help you cut to the chase, and get started on your application (due May 22).

 

1. Start driving. Get key people on board.

Governor’s Award Applications are typically a team effort, but there is often a single person or small team that drives the process forward. The application drivers can be anyone – from top management to employees who volunteer time on a Green Team. If you’re reading this, you may be the driver!

 

Send a note out to co-workers letting them know you’re preparing a Gov.’s Award application. Here are some key people to get on board early (positions vary by organization):

  • Top Management
  • Facilities/Operations Manager
  • Plant Manager
  • Sustainability Officer/Green Team Lead
  • PR Officer

 

2. Read these two things. These are your “how to” guides to help you best relay your sustainability successes in your application. Remember, quantifying your actions are just as important as clearly describing them!

 

Narrative Guidelines – You have up to six single-spaced pages to describe your sustainability accomplishments. These guidelines tell you how.

 

Metrics Form InstructionsDownload the Metrics Form (Microsoft Excel format) and read the Instructions tab.

 

3. Check out the sample applications.

The sample applications, available HERE, display best practices from past winners’ applications. Note that a good application typically includes a variety of projects touching on multiple impacts or aspects of sustainability. The project descriptions will also include some detail on how they were conceived and who was involved. We want to hear how your organization went from idea to implementation.

 

 

BONUS TIP: Consider normalizing your data.

Normalized data is reported on a relevant per-unit basis. One of our 2013 award winners, Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District, tracked their water use in this way before and after implementing water conservation measures in their wash bay. Instead of simply reporting total gallons of water consumed, they reported gallons per vehicle-hour, providing us with a water-use measure that can be compared across years, regardless of how many trips the buses make.  This type of measurement, a normalized metric, is extremely helpful for evaluating your progress – the true impact of a sustainability project.

 

Check out the Illinois Manufacturer Inc. sample application for more normalization examples and talk to your team about what per-unit measures you might use in your application.

 

If you still have questions about the process, contact Cassie Carroll for more information via e-mail at ccarrol2@illinois.edu or call her at 630.891.3044.

Researcher Spotlight: Joy Scrogum

photo of Joy ScrogumJoy Scrogum has been a sustainability professional for over 13 years, with ISTC’s public engagement and technical assistance programs. Joy has provided support for the Great Lakes Regional Pollution Prevention Roundtable (GLRPPR) since 2001, particularly in the development and maintenance of online resource compilations (Topic Hubs and Sector Resources) on a wide variety of sustainability issues. GLRPPR is a US EPA-funded regional center in the national Pollution Prevention Resource Exchange (P2Rx) network. Joy also played a key role in Greening Schools, a joint project between the IL EPA and ISTC which focused on making K-12 facilities & curricula more sustainable.

 

Joy’s most recent work with ISTC has centered around the Sustainable Electronics Initiative (SEI), for which she serves as coordinator. SEI is dedicated to the development and implementation of a more sustainable system for designing, producing, using, and managing electronic devices. She managed SEI’s International Sustainable Electronics Competition for college and university students; coordinates consortium meetings on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus related to sustainable electronics research, education, and operations; and taught a class in collaboration with the UI Technology Entrepreneur Center in the College of Engineering (ENG/TE 498: Sustainable Technology: Environmental and Social Impacts of Innovations) which used electronic products as the framework for discussion. Joy also currently works on Zero Waste Illinois projects.

 

With a MS in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Joy says her education has prepared her for the complex considerations associated with sustainability. “It may seem strange for someone with a background in wildlife ecology to be talking about design and end-of-life management related to electronics, but I think that ecological perspective is exactly what’s needed. Whether you’re talking about the life cycle of an organism or a product, you have to consider interactions with the larger system when it comes to sustainable solutions. It’s useful to think of products, services—any human activity—in the context of the ecosystem which is constantly impacting, and being impacted by, us. Helping students develop that sort of worldview, regardless of their field of study, is my favorite part of my job. I feel education for sustainability is a critical part of the University’s role in today’s society.”

 

Joy’s other duties include writing grant proposals and reports, blog posts, and fact sheets; contributing to social media campaigns; project development; and presenting at professional and public events such as the Naturally Illinois Expo. She also enjoys reviewing applications for the annual Illinois Governor’s Sustainability Awards Program, the oldest continuously running environmental awards program in the US. She is a member of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals, the Reuse Alliance, and the Illinois Food Scrap Coalition.

 

Connect with Joy on Twitter or LinkedIn.