Primary Contact Name: Carli Baker
Project Name: Trash to Treasure: A DIY Book Aimed at Reducing Home Waste
2012 Mini-Grant Application
Project Title: Trash to Treasure: A DIY Book Aimed at Reducing Home Waste
Total Amount Requested: $980.00
Amount Requested as: Grant
Sponsoring Organization/Fiscal Agent:
Berkeley Student Food Collective
ReUSE
Project leader(s):
Name
Carli Baker
Year & Major/
Title &
Department
Third Year. Simultaneously Majoring in Conservation and Resource
Studies in the College of Natural Resources and Anthropology in the
College of Letters and Science
Phone
916.757.4315
Email
fundraising@foodcollective.org
Name
Claire Porter
Phone
925.330.8902
Email
sayclaire@berkeley.edu
Project Details:
1. Describe the overall goals of the project.
In an effort to educate our community and reduce waste in the Berkeley area, the
Berkeley Student Food Collective aims to partner with ReUSE to create a print and
online waste reduction book. This collaboration will further both our missions by
providing an educational tool that can empower our community to take active steps in
reducing their household waste. In this project, both organizations will be working as
equal partners in this endeavor with both organizations providing support, volunteers, and
expertise. Any profits made by this project will be split by the organizations or will be
used only to further waste reduction efforts on campus. This project is more than just a
simple book, it is a community engagement initiative that will encourage people to look
at the ways that they buy products, use household items, and the patterns of their waste
which can be reduced. Through a multifaceted physical and online media campaign we
will build awareness about our product and about the impacts of household waste on the
Primary Contact Name: Carli Baker
Project Name: Trash to Treasure: A DIY Book Aimed at Reducing Home Waste
environment, in hopes that people will understand the ease in which waste can be reduced
effectively.
The book itself will be a fun, informative, and interactive experience in basic Do It
Yourself projects, along with recipes featuring lesser known products, advice, personal
anecdotes, and concrete environmental data about food and home waste. Our book is
tentatively titled “From Trash to Treasure: Fast, Simple Ways to Reimagine, Repurpose
and Reuse All the Things You Throw Away,” and will be aimed at current college and
students and recent grads, highlighting the ways in which these ideas can be used to
decrease costs and increase the longevity of items that have already been purchased. We
will also highlight the plethora of second hand stores such a Goodwill, East Bay Center
for Creative Reuse, Urban Ore, and more, in order to support the local businesses that
actively work towards waste reduction.
2. How will this project be implemented? Describe the steps.
This project will be implemented in three steps: Tutorial Creation & Collection, Book
Design, and Marketing, Outreach, & Printing. We will first create a book committee,
primarily composed of Food Collective and ReUSE members, who will be in charge of
all material, design, and printing decisions. Each member will be primarily responsible
for one section of the book, but will assist the entire group when necessary. At this time
the book sections include In the Kitchen, In the Garden, In Your Closet, Beauty and
Health, In Your Backpack, and Odds & Ends. All of these sections will have a minimum
of five projects which are easy to complete, reduce waste, and require minimal inputs
beyond what someone would have in their home/dorm room.
After we have begun to collect different tutorials and brainstorm other ideas, we will
being our marketing and outreach campaign, aimed at including our community in the
process of creating this book. We will table on Sproul asking for suggestions, ideas,
contributions, and members to join our Book committee. We will also begin designing
our Tumblr in order to build a community in the social media sphere. We will consider
joining additional social media sites (Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter) as necessary.
Around this time we will also begin to advertise for a Design Intern to be in charge of
designing the book and placing all of the material in an aesthetically pleasing way. We
will partner in these efforts with TGIF so that we are able to find the most suitable
candidate for the position. This position will be in charge of the technical aspects of
building a book, and will work with the other members of the Book committee to create a
complete project.
Once the book has been completed, we will choose an online media hosting site such as
Issuu, Zinio, or Magcloud to host our product. We will charge a small price($5-10) to
download the book onto a computer, and will include a plea to not print the book out to
save paper. However, we will also offer two printing options for a slightly higher price.
The first would be a loose leaf, full color copy of the book, bound is a ReUSE binder,
instilling a tradition of repurposing into the book itself. We will also offer a print option
with traditional binding. Both print options will hopefully be sourced from a green
Primary Contact Name: Carli Baker
Project Name: Trash to Treasure: A DIY Book Aimed at Reducing Home Waste
printing company, allowing our paper consumption to be as sustainably minded as
possible. At this point we will continue to market our book, and attempt to find places
willing to sell it, promote it, or distribute it, but the majority of our project will be
complete. Throughout the remainder of the year we will continue to monitor our social
media sites, hold workshops demonstrating some of the tutorials, and gauge interest in a
second edition of our book. All of the profits for this project will be split between the
Berkeley Student Food Collective, ReUSE, and some will be saved for another edition if
we believe it would be popular.
3. Which aspects of campus sustainability will your project tackle? What are the
quantitative and/or qualitative sustainability metrics?
This project targets household and campus waste through education and outreach, but
rather than dealing with waste after it has been disposed, we aim to encourage the reuse
and reimagination of various single-use household items and foods. By encouraging
creative repurposing rather than sticking to the mantra of disposability, we are working to
change consumer consciousness. We want our students to ask themselves, “How can I
use this again and again” rather than “Well I can always buy another.” Due to the nature
of this project, there will not be many ways to quantify our sustainability metrics other
than through our book sales, which does not accurately reflect the amount of waste
diverted, but rather indicates a population to which waste reduction is interesting or
appealing. In order to get information about how many people utilize our book, we plan
to create a Tumblr, site, where people are encouraged to send in their attempts at our
projects, share their feedback/thoughts on our book in general, and hopefully create a
forum in which this information can be shared, discussed, and promoted. In this way, the
educational value of our book goes beyond its physical pages and becomes an
opportunity for sustained community interaction around waste reduction and
management. The number of submissions to the Tumblr, as well as the number of
followers will be an indicator of the effectiveness of our book as an educational tool
rather than a simple product.
4. How will you measure the sustainability and environmental benefits?
We will measure our sustainability and environmental benefits in three distinct ways.
First, we will track the purchasing of our book in general. Although these numbers will
not accurately reflect a specific level of waste reduction, it does inform us of the interest
on campus for similar resources, which will inform our educational and outreach efforts
in the future. Second, we will track the percentage of customers who buy the online PDF,
print copy bound in a ReUSE binder, and the professionally bound copies. These
percentages will allow us to gauge how popular electronic books are, and if they are a
viable alternative to print books. This will also allow us to measure the paper and ink
saved through electronic books, which could be circulated to other campus publications,
perhaps allowing them to see the possible benefits of going paperless. Third, at the end of
our first wave of book sales, we will be able to measure how much more sustainable our
business model was compared to traditional book printing techniques. By providing a
variety of mediums in which to view our product, we reduce paper waste from the
beginning, and through green printing we support ecologically sound business models as
well as the environment.
Primary Contact Name: Carli Baker
Project Name: Trash to Treasure: A DIY Book Aimed at Reducing Home Waste
5. What is your plan for publicizing your project? Do you have any specific outreach
goals?
The publicity and outreach of this project will be relatively simple. Utilizing the support
networks of TGIF, The Berkeley Student Food Collective, ReUSE and other
sustainability student groups, we hope to promote our book throughout the Spring
semester, build a community around our Tumblr, and begin conversations about how
members of our community reduce their waste. We will have a Trash to Treasure email
account, where people will be able to submit their own ideas, tips, tutorials, or give any
feedback to our group about our project. We will also start a Sproul tabling campaign that
will promote our project, get supporters, and help us attract people to work on our project.
We also plan to reach out to the Residential Sustainability Program as well as the dorm
Resident Assistant’s asking them to support our work, either by promoting our book to
their students, or by taking a more active role and including our book as part of their new
student orientation materials for the 2013-2014 school year. We believe that waste
reduction in the dorms is a fantastic place to initiate these discussions, and our tutorials,
tips, and ideas could be very helpful for RA’s when they are looking for activities to do
with their floor. This partnership reinforces the campus’ goal of becoming a zero waste
school by 2020. Additionally, by targeting students early in their Cal career, we will be
able to affect their lifestyle choices from the beginning, hopefully leading to habits of
reuse and repurposing throughout their lives.
Project Approvals Needed:
At this point we do not need any project approvals from any campus entity or other organization.
Budget:
List all budget items for which funding is being requested under the appropriate category.
Include costs/item and total amount/item requested. Please be as detailed as possible.
Cost per
Item
Quantity
Total
Request
Trial Materials- For tutorials we have not personally tried, we
will need to run a trial to ensure that the project is doable,
achieves desired results, and that our instructions are clear
--
--
$200.00
Printing Costs- While we are planning on having a primarily
online book host, we understand the allure of a printed book. To
accommodate this, we are planning on printing between 25-50
hard copies of the book, some in a loose leaf format that comes
with a free ReUSE binder, and others that are bound for
convenience. This number is just an estimate, as we will
hopefully benefit from the report about green printing that the
Berkeley Science Review is undertaking. While we understand
that this may increase costs, we believe it is important to support
For a 20
page
book at
Copy
Central
$12
40
$480.00
Item
Equipment and Construction Costs
Primary Contact Name: Carli Baker
Project Name: Trash to Treasure: A DIY Book Aimed at Reducing Home Waste
sustainable printing practices as much as possible. If we receive
this grant, I will also be meeting with Chris Wong, who is in
charge of student publications, to get advice from him about
publishing our book.
Personnel and Wages
Design Intern- Once our book has been compiled, we will hire an $12/hr
intern to help us with the technical design of our book, and to be
in charge of the Photoshop/inDesign/etc that may be required to
physically create our book.
20-25
$300.00
max
TOTAL $ 980.00