UGA Students Awarded Sustainability Grants

Six UGA students have received grants worth $20,000 from the University of Georgia’s Office of Sustainability. The money is generated by the student-paid Green Fee. It funds projects to advance campus sustainability.

Applicants submitted 21 grant proposals in December. A selection committee composed of UGA students, faculty and staff evaluated them. Each winning proposal addressed priorities from UGA’s 2020 Strategic Plan to conserve resources, educate the campus community about environmental issues and provide research to further sustainability at the university.

“It was fun to read all of the proposals,” said Kate Klein, a senior Environmental Health Sciences major, co-chair of the Go Green Alliance and one of three students on the selection committee. “It was really cool to see how people were thinking about sustainability in so many different senses.”

Winning the 2012 Campus Sustainability Grants are:

• Brandi Bishop, a senior agricultural education major at UGA’s Tifton campus. She will develop a recycling program at the campus, installing 60 Waste Reduction Stations in 15 of the busiest buildings at the university. The stations will make it easier and more convenient to recycle and will save landfill space. Bishop will also launch a public relations campaign to encourage university and community members to produce less waste.

• Katie Shepard, a master’s student in UGA’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. She plans to monitor the effectiveness of a rain garden at filtering pollutants from storm water runoff. Shepard’s project will measure soil moisture and water quality to determine how well the rain garden does its job. Her findings will help ensure that existing—and planned--rain gardens continue to act as effective filters for storm water on campus. Classes in the Warnell School of Forestry, Crop and Soil Sciences and the College of Environment and Design will monitor the project, allowing it to serve as a living laboratory for future education.

• Chris McDowell, a master’s student in the College of Environment and Design, will show how construction and demolition waste products can be diverted from the landfill and converted into tangible community-based improvements.  He will work with authorities to collect waste items from construction sites. With volunteers’ help, he will reuse materials to complete construction projects that benefit the campus and local community. He also plans to undertake a communications campaign to recruit volunteers and educate the public on the benefits of material reuse.

• JoHanna Biang, a master’s student in horticulture, will construct a living wall planted with seasonal herbs and vegetables to research and demonstrate the effectiveness of vertical gardening. The wall will be installed at UGArden, UGA’s campus community garden, and will be maintained by student volunteers. The herbs and vegetables grown on the wall will be harvested by Campus Kitchens for distribution to the Northeast Georgia Food Bank and community members in need.

• Graham Pickren, a Ph.D student in geography, is expanding a program that collects, donates and recycles discarded items from student residence halls during move-out week. Pickren will be working with Dawgs Ditch the Dumpster Move-Out Donation Program to start an electronic waste collection to go along with the clothing and furniture donation program. When school ends this semester, students can bring unwanted electronics to campus drop-off sites to be recycled or donated to local charities.

• Zach Richardson, a senior landscape architecture student, will create a prescribed grazing program to remove exotic and invasive plants and restore native forest adjacent to Tanyard Creek. His project will use goats to remove plants such as privet and English ivy. With faculty in the College of Environment and Design and the Warnell School of Forestry, he will coordinate student volunteers to assist the four-legged campus visitors in removing larger invasive plants from the project area and will monitor the project’s effectiveness over time.

Last year, the Sustainability office awarded $13,000 to fund four projects: installing water bottle refilling stations in the Miller Learning Center, creating a rainwater harvesting system at UGArden, establishing the Dawgs Ditch the Dumpster move-out donation program and starting a bike share program on East Campus, a project still in progress.