2012 Request for Proposal: UST Campus Sustainability Fund
Your proposal must include all of the following sections, in this format, or it will not be
reviewed. Bold section titles should be retained; italicized instructions may be removed.
The committee is available for initial feedback or to answer questions. Please submit any
materials to Jesse Stock by email (stoc2947@stthomas.edu) prior to Friday, September 28 if you
would like feedback on your preliminary proposal.
Submit completed proposal by 10/12/12 at 5:00 p.m. to Kris Wammer:
khwammer@stthomas.edu
1.
Project Title: EXPANSION OF UST ON-CAMPUS COMPOSTING INITIATIVE
2. Primary Applicant:
Quinn Wrenholt
Environmental Science dept.
Senior Student
wren9489@stthomas.edu
(952) 564-8165
Elizabeth Phyle
History and Justice and Peace Studies
Junior Student
phyl4503@sthomas.com
(612) 220-2805
3. Secondary Applicant (Optional, if primary applicant is faculty or staff):
Chester Wilson
Biology dept.
Professor
c9wilson@stthomas.edu
(651) 962-5234
4. Other proposal support:
List other individuals, in addition to the primary and secondary applicant, who will be involved
in the proposed project. Also list any departments, colleges, or schools that have pledged to
provide support (ideally, documentation of such support should be included with the
application).
See Appendix B.
5. Overview and purpose of the project:
Include a description of how your project will directly benefit and address sustainability at the
University of St. Thomas campuses. See the website for more detail about the types of projects
the CSF is designed to support.
The purpose of this project is to start to change the way we think about our waste.
Composting confronts the idea that when you throw something away it just disappears and
provides alternatives to sending our waste to landfills. To begin to make these changes at UST,
we will expand Chester Willson’s vermiculture composting program that already composts all of
the coffee grounds from Beakers in OWS. By expanding on his efforts, which have continued
successfully since the south campus science buildings were opened, we will raise awareness and
the level of composting on campus. We will expand this operation by purchasing more
vermiculture composting bins. Vermiculture is essentially worm composting; using worms to
break down food waste into usable and fertile soil. Vermiculture composting bins are relatively
small, inexpensive, and low-maintenance making them the best option for on-site composting.
The waste that we will be composting using these additional bins will be the coffee
grounds from Coffee Bene in the library and The Loft in the Anderson Student Center, as well as
the fruit waste from T’s. These sources of waste make the most sense to focus on in terms of
composting because they are practical to access, they can be used as a teaching device, and the
scale of a project addressing coffee ground waste is not overwhelming, making this a good place
to start.
Composting the coffee grounds on campus is important because there is also an
educational campaign going on on-campus around fair trade coffee. By incorporating the oncampus composting project into this pre-existing educational campaign we can help students
think broadly about their interactions with food. All the coffee we drink comes from soil and
returns to soil, affecting many lives in the process. For students to understand the full weight of
what they are eating and drinking, it is necessary for them to understand how their sources of
retrieval and their sources of disposal affect the soil. With the fruit in the Binz, the students will
actually be able to engage in disposing their waste, not just into some unknown future location,
but into an on-campus composting system that they can track and participate in.
The educational events that we will be hosting will take shape in a number of ways. We
have already begun to develop relationships with RA’s who are dedicated to composting and
interested in teaching their residents about composting through use of the on-campus composting
site. Students for Justice and Peace, Green Team, and the Geology club have already signed on
(please see Appendix B.) to incorporating composting into their clubs’ activities. With the
support of these active clubs on campus we will be able to outreach a large number of students.
The film screening of Dirt! The Movie, as just happened on campus, is an example of how we
will involved and educate students. Provided that our project is approved we will sponsor the
following events:


Student for Justice and Peace is hosting coffee taste testing event on campus. They will
be asking students to do a blind taste test of Peace Coffee versus Seattle’s Best so they
can taste the difference in richness in organic fair trade coffee. Then they will explain all
the important differences between these two coffees, aside from taste, including the
degradation of the soil. They will promote composting on campus at this event by asking
student to think about the soil in which the coffee came from and then by giving them a
pamphlet about composting on campus. This provides for a rich experience because it
gives the students several important connections to think about.
Green Team will sponsor composting tour soon after the new bins are installed. First they
will have a presentation on composting, explaining how it works and why it's so
beneficial. Then the club member will visit the composting site to see how vermiculture


actually works. This will provide a hands-on learning experience in additional to an
informative lecture.
All clubs involved in this process will be able to deliver the soil to our donation site, for a
hands on experience with benefits of this process.
Once the members of our core supporting clubs are educated about the composting
process we will sponsor campus wide educational events. This will include educating on
how to compost, different options for composting, how it works, how we do it on
campus, and why its so beneficial. RAs will be a key ally in this campus wide education
process. RA’s Ana Schanzenbach, Tony Guidotti, and Yan Yan Teague have already
agreed to work within their residence halls to bring composting education campus wide.
See appendix B.
This project is so important for our campus because it connects pre-existing programs
such as the Fair Trade Coffee Campaign, the Stewardship Garden, and the View food waste to
pig farmers project together into a larger food justice framework. This is possible because of our
practical scale, our solid contacts throughout the university, and the success pre-existing model
to work with and expand upon.
6. How the project will be implemented:
Provide details about the operational feasibility of your project. If you need support from any
affected campus individuals and departments (e.g., if the physical plant needs to be involved with
installation or purchasing), please attach letter of support. This support must be secured prior
to submitting the application for the proposal to be considered. If you received any concerns
about your project or discovered potential barriers to its implementation as a result of seeking
support from any affected campus individuals and/or departments, please include that
information as well.
Since this is an expansion of Chester Wilson’s successful composting project, we will be
able to utilize his already developed resources and systems. His vermiculture composting is
located in the south campus greenhouse. He is confident in his ability to successfully
accommodate the project to a larger scale. We have his full support to go forward with the
composting project within the process that he has already laid out. Our plan for the
implementation will involve dedicated students on-campus who will form the Composting club.
Our plans for the club are laid out as such: Students from Students for Justice and Peace,
Geology Club, and Green Team have already expressed interest in being involved with
composting on campus and fourteen students have already put their names on a composting
email list. With the level of support that we’ve seen already it would not be difficult to find at
least 10 dedicated students to join the composting club. The composting club would be subcommittee of Green Team. These students would be responsible for picking up the coffee and
fruit waste from the specified on campus locations, bringing it to the greenhouse, and
maintaining the vermiculture composting bins. This primarily involves rotating the trays so that
the newly produced soil can be collected and the worms can start composting the newly added
waste. If there were 10 students in the Composting Club each student would perform
approximately 2 hours of composting work per week. The incentive for them to join, aside from
being involved in an important sustainability initiative on campus would be free meals once a
week provided by the Green Team as compensation for their involvement and efforts. Although
we are confident in our ability to recruit students to join the Composting Club committee of
Green Team, as a back up Quinn and I our each prepared to dedicate 10 hours when/if needed.
(See appendix B for support regarding access to the coffee grounds on campus.)
7. Budget:
Include an itemized budget and, if appropriate, specific details about equipment or materials.
One five-tray worm bin: $118 (includes S&H)
Dr. Wilson’s current operation is 10 bins through which is processes 30 gallons of coffee
grounds/week (output of 10 gallons of composted soil)
10 lbs of worms: $189 (S&H costs?)
This is enough for five to six of the stacks mentioned above. So we will likely require a
minimum of 20 lbs of worms.
With 20 new bins and 20 lbs of worms, a tripling of the operation:
Estimated Costs:
Tripling - $3,000 Plus $500 To Cover Other Expenses
If funds are not available to triple the operation doubling if would be an option as well:
$1,500 Plus $500 To Cover Other Expenses
In this case we would be composting the coffee grounds produced at the Loft in ASC
These numbers were provided by Chester Wilson and are the prices exactly associated with the
current vermiculture infrastructure that he maintains.
8.
Include defined metrics for a clearly measurable outcome and a schedule of
appropriate progress reports to the CSF through the duration of the project: ElizabethRatio from Chester
Updates should be provided at approximately 6-month intervals. All funded projects must submit
a final report within 60 days of the completion of the project. If a project has continuing benefits
such as an annual cost savings or carbon reduction or educational benefit, the project plan
should include plans for tracking, recording, and reporting such benefits back to the CSF on an
annual basis for a minimum of three years. Submitters of any funded project plan who fail to
complete progress or final reports are ineligible to receive any future funding from the CSF.
We will then calculate how much carbon we are eliminating from the atmosphere, how
much money is being saved through less waste services, and how much soil is being produced.
These numbers can be easily recorded because it will be students from the composting club
along with Chester Wilson that are handling and hauling the material. The numbers will be
submitted to the CSF every six month in formant such as this:
Implemented
6 months later
1 year later
1 year 6 months
Waste composted
0
x
x
x
Carbon Eliminated
0
x
x
x
Money saved
0
x
x
x
Soil Produced
0
x
x
x
9. If your project will offset greenhouse gases and reduce the campus carbon footprint,
describe thoroughly how this will happen:
Assuming 2 tons of waste per month composted, which is roughly tripling the size of the
current operation we would be eliminating 1.76 metric tons/month of CO2E emissions from the
atmosphere. This is equivalent to eliminating 4.56 cars from the road per month. That is just the
reduction based on that waste not being in the landfill, there would be additional carbon reduced
from not having to transport that waste to the site and such. See appendix see C. for calculation
source.
Although greenhouse gases will be reduced, this project serves more to catalyze a
sustainable initiative that can be expanded on in years to come. It will provide a conduit and
starting ground for further reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and UST’s carbon footprint.
10. Describe if and how students will be involved and/or the educational value to our
community:
Students will change the way they relate to their leftover food. Once they know that their
uneaten leftovers can have an effect on climate change, it will change the way that they think
about their waste. Students will learn about this through on-campus educational activities, hosted
on behalf of the composting project, centered around this process and about how they can get
involved. One important way that students will be able to get involved in this will be through the
Composting Club described above. Student support is important for the implementation of this
composting project, but involvement in the process is also a great opportunity for the student
body as it will give them a chance to be involved with campus waste management, an experience
that most students would otherwise never have.
The presence of composting on campus is beneficial to the community as a whole
because it helps us fulfill our mission statement of thinking critically and acting wisely to
advance the common good. This project is so beneficial to the University Mission Statement and
the St. Thomas. community as a whole because it is the only opportunity that we have to be
directly involved on this end of the food chain. In recent years people have been increasingly
encouraged to buy local and know where their food is coming from. While this still has a long
way to go, it has gotten a lot of people thinking. People still rarely ever think about where their
waste goes, nevertheless have a relationship with the disposal process. Through implementing
this program we will give the St. Thomas community the chance to experience the whole
lifecycle of their food from soil to table to soil and show them that this process can be completed
on a sustainable community level.
11. Highlight innovations and the potential for the project to be scalable across our
campuses:
There is a lot of potential for this project to grow and to be scaled across the different
campuses. It is actually inherent to the mission driving this proposal that the project be scalable
and that it will provide a foundation upon which future composting initiatives – be they
education-based or centered around overall waste production – can be developed. Further, we
want to catalyze a network of students, faculty, and staff who are dedicated to promoting and
conducting on-campus composting and who will serve as a permanent resource for future related
projects.
One idea for a future composting project that could certainly be funded by the CSF, as it
would definitely increase our campus sustainability level, is to develop a partnership with Eureka
Recycling. By 2014, Eureka is planning to provide a compost pick-up resource to the entire city
of St. Paul. Once this is the case, it will provide a sink for much more of UST’s food waste as we
will no longer have to consider where the compost is going, but will only need to be concerned
with food waste collection and subsequently putting it out for Eureka to collect. More
information about Eureka’s city-wide composting initiative can be found here:
www.makedirtnotwaste.org
12. If applicable, include lifecycle costs, possible investment payback schedules and
potential long-term savings:
The lifecycle costs of this project are minimal due to the low costs of maintenance and
relatively low initial costs. These compost bins are a long-term sustainable investment. Chester
Wilson has been using the same vermiculture set up for the past 10+ years. This system has
proved reliable and durable and we are confident in using it for our proposed project.
Although the money saved by sending the waste to the on-campus composting location,
instead of having it picked up will be minimal it is the ideal of being able to deal with our own
waste in a sustainable and efficient manner that is the keystone of this project. Composting is an
important part of our transition to a sustainable future, one that doesn’t rely paying to ship our
waste to a landfill. Another benefit from the composting project is the nitrogen rich soil that is
produced through composting. It will be used in the Stewardship Garden and given away to an
organization in need that Chester Wilson is connected to.
13. If necessary, include additional supplemental materials as an appendix to the main
application. Please limit the application plus appendix to no more than 10 total pages.
A. Projects similar to ours have been successfully completed at universities around the country.
The following is an example of how it was done at UC Davis and their composting instructions
for other universities to follow. We used this as a starting of point for out proposal and will
continue to learn from their efforts and the efforts of college all around the country implementing
similar initiatives for sustainability.
http://projectcompost.ucdavis.edu/sites/default/files/COLLEGE_.pdf
B. We received the following support for our project.
C. StopWaste.org is a Waste Management Authority in Alameda County. They are in charge
of the Waste Management Plan for Alameda County, which provides a variety of sustainable
development plans for the fourteen cities within their county.
http://www.stopwaste.us/partnership/calculator/