Portfolio of Projects Completed as of June 2010
Anthony Hall LEED-EBOM Certification
Awarded $10,000 in 2008
The Anthony Hall LEED-EBOM Certification project was discontinued by the
request of the TGIF Coordinator.
The Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) Carbon Smart and
LEED-EB Certification Project
Awarded $5,200 in 2009; additional grant of $4,450
awarded in November 2009
The staff at Berkeley’s Center for Latin American
Studies (CLAS) used their TGIF grant to practice
what they preach in their “Alternative Energy and
the Americas” program. CLAS has taken significant
steps toward greater sustainability, such as hiring a
student intern from Building Sustainability at Cal
(BS@C), to help achieve the goals outlined in the
university’s Climate Action Plan. Some key
moments from the last year include:
March 2010: CLAS upgraded its most-used
computer monitors with Energy Star models which
are halogen-free and made from 25 percent postconsumer recycled plastic, some of the most
energy efficient models on the market. The new
monitors further reduce the Center’s carbon footprint.
CLAS became a Blue Certified Green Department. CLAS is the ninth department
on the Berkeley campus to become certified by the Office of Sustainability.
Certification means CLAS made a significant effort to make their office as
energy and resource efficient as possible practicing double sided printing,
battery and ink toner recycling, and using reusable cups and plates among
other actions.
February 2010: As a result of eliminating unnecessary appliances and bottled
water dispensers, practicing daylighting, and turning off computers, CLAS was
able to reduce its electrical consumption rates by 30 percent when compared
to the previous three years.
January 2010: A private film screening and reception was certified as a Green
Event by the Office of Sustainability. The function was catered by a local service
which provides vegetarian options, alternatives to bottled water, compostable
plates, paperless invitations, reusable nametags, and sustainable centerpieces.
The Green Event shows the Center’s dedication to practicing sustainability
outside the office.
After months of educating staff members, researching alternatives, and testing
water quality, CLAS canceled its contract for two five-gallon bottled water
dispensers, thereby reducing its carbon footprint, promoting better health, and
saving money.
Project Lead:
Beth Perry
Program Coordinator, Center for Latin American Studies
Earthweek 2010
Awarded $10,000 in 2008 ($2,000 per year from 2009-2014)
Organized by the ASUC’s Sustainability
Team (STeam), Earthweek 2010 (April 17th –
24th) was celebrated with a variety of
events including concerts, art installations,
and film screenings. STeam organized and
coordinated with other student groups on
campus to bring almost fifteen distinct
events prior to and during the event. For
instance, a publicity tour for the Disney
movie Oceans came to UC Berkeley to
screen the movie the day before the actual
release and to help coordinate a concert with the Cold War Kids and an art
installation with sea creates on Upper Sproul. Other more traditional Earthweek
events such as the Strawberry Creek Clean-up and the Chancellor’s Advisory
Committee on Sustainability (CACS) Summit were held as well. Next year the
Earthweek committee hopes to build on the successes of this year’s event and
continue to improve marketing efforts to create awareness in the campus
community about sustainability.
Project Leads:
L. Jasmine Tuadi
Mandy Jones
Undergraduate Student
Undergraduate Student
No More Down the Drain
Awarded $2,700 in 2009
This project is an effort by the ASUC Art studio to reduce the amount of scrap
clay and excess glaze being washed down the drain and thrown away in the
trash. TGIF funds were used to purchase two special closed-system recycling
sinks, called “Cinks”, where students could wash dirty tools and have the glaze
and waste clay captured. To help alleviate some of the need for additional
time to manage the program, the Art Studio created an internship program to
have some members work on the ceramics project in exchange for membership
fees. Enough material has been captured to glaze over 3,500 coffee mugs and
to make almost 1,000 clay coffee mugs. The Art Studio plans to continue
refining the process for the clay recapture system as well as potentially working
with other groups to supply flower pots created from recycled materials.
Project Leads:
Kate Wees
Art Studio, ASUC Auxiliary
Erik Scollon
Talking Louder about Campus Sustainability
Awarded $18,250 in 2009
Robby Abrams
Expanding the culture of sustainability at UC Berkeley – a goal of the Office of
Sustainability (Office) - requires improving access to information on a continuing
basis, educating a broad range of community members, and empowering
people to take positive action. With this in mind, the students and the Office
embarked on a year-long intensive communications effort to talk louder about
sustainability launched in June 2009 and implemented primarily by a team of
student associates.
This campaign differed from many other outreach
campaigns nationwide in the effort reach out to non-traditional sustainability
audiences, create more permanent solutions and
partnerships, and raise the profile of UC Berkeley’s work.
Some of varied tactics used during the Talking Louder
Campaign included developing a comprehensive
marketing-communications plan, redesigning the main
campus sustainability website and companion sites,
creating on-line and on-campus sustainability tours,
offering twice per semester student sustainability forms,
and increasing coverage, frequency, and readership
of the Bright Green newsletter. Many of the efforts of
this year’s Talking Louder about Sustainability
campaign will be continued into the future –
particularly those that were found to have the most
impact and can be expanded to meet the demands
of an ever increasingly sophisticated audience. Talking
Louder about Campus Sustainability was one of the
projects to present a poster at the 2010 CACS Summit.
Project Leads:
Kira Stoll
Sustainability Specialist,
Office of Sustainability
Lisa McNeilly
Director of Sustainability,
Office of Sustainability
Wurster Hall Composting Project
Awarded $3,000 in 2009
This project was discontinued by request of the grantee due to significant rise in
costs for the department to implement a composting program.
Project Leads:
Eli Perszyk
Facilities Manager,
College of Environmental Design
Shirley Ferentinos
Manager,
Housing and Dining Services
Updates on Continuing TGIF Projects
2009 Grant Awards
Berkeley Student Food Collective
Awarded $91,000
During the 2009-2010 academic year, the Berkeley
Student Food Collective completed small goals on
the road to its larger goal of establishing an oncampus food cooperative. The BSFC membership
unanimously approved a
motion to pursue a mobile
kitchen and began selling
sandwiches
on
Sproul
Plaza
every
Monday,
including tofu banh mi, black bean burgers,
chickpea burgers, and red lentil patties. The
Collective took out an insurance policy to cover the
sales of food and the various events for which it will
be providing food. Three members of our Board of Directors represented the
BSFC at the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference in Miami. The External
Affairs Committee of the Berkeley Student Co-operative voted to endorse a
continuation of BSFC’s fiscal sponsorship agreement, while the BSFC continued
to raise funds through a twelve-hour Dance-A-Thon.
Project Leads:
Alli Reed
Undergraduate Student
Christina Oatfield
Undergraduate Student
Betterbin
Awarded $3,500
The Betterbin project set out to design space efficient recycling bins suitable for
small dorm rooms and then eventually implement these “Betterbins” in all the
dorm rooms at UC Berkeley. The goal for the 2009-2010 academic year was to
manufacture ~100 bins for in-dorm testing and deliver a presentation to campus
officials proposing the benefits of using the Betterbin in all dorm rooms. From
RSEC feedback of the Betterbin prototypes, a final design was determined: 3
bins that are hooked together for stability, but can be detached for easy
emptying. The bins include specialized tops to distinguish which bins are for what
type of product. The bins are currently stored in Berkeley Institute of Design (BiD),
on the second floor of Hearst Memorial Mining Building. The materials for building
an actual bin have yet to be specified because the type of material will largely
be influenced by the scale of manufacture. Betterbin has recently been
struggling with a lack of motivation on its team and a lack of progress with
getting the first 100 bins made.
The next steps for the project include:
 Test the bin prototype in individual rooms to determine user acceptance
of design
 Get approval to test Betterbins for an entire dorm building in order to
acquire quantitative data for analysis
 Produce Betterbins and generate proper metrics for the test
 Collect data for 1 semester
 Analyze sustainability impact


Propose adoption of Betterbins in all UC Berkeley dorm rooms
Expand use of Betterbins to classrooms and other campuses
Project Lead:
Iris Jiang
Undergraduate Student
BicyCal
Awarded $12,000
During the course of the Spring 2010 semester,
BicyCal could be found twice-weekly at the
North Gate and on Upper Sproul fixing bikes.
The group provided both free maintenance
and education for roughly 50-100 bicyclists.
BicyCal’s greatest accomplishment was
gaining access to a maintenance and
educational HUB, to be located in the
lower/upper Sproul breezeway. BicyCal will be
setting up a home base for bicycle
maintenance and education that will be
open 2 days a week starting the Fall 2010
semester. BicyCal plans on submitting a
reallocation for funds so it can put some of
the grant money towards the space. BicyCal’s outreach and publicity has been
conducted mainly through the repair days and its blog. BicyCal also distributed
materials at the 2010 Bike-to-Work Day and to local bicycle shops. For project
photos, please visit http://bicycal.com/.
Project Leads:
Austin Andrews
Undergraduate Student
Justin Wiley
Undergraduate Student
Lawns to Meadows Plan and Implementation
Awarded $40,000
Over the course of the 2009-2010 academic year, all of the background work for
the Lawns to Meadows Plan was completed. The team gathered campus input
from a workshop held in January and researched campus costs on water, labor,
and benchmarking. Four potential sites need to be whittled down to two, one of
which could be the Anthony Hall front lawn. Other projects on campus are
catching on and adopting the Lawns to Meadows approach. Clark Kerr has
already added native plant designs into its LEED certified project and attempts
are being made to add meadows or native plants into the Helios and Anna
Head building projects.
Project Leads:
Jim Horner
Campus Landscape Architect
Theron Klos
Operations Manager
Recycling at Cal Program
Awarded $55,000
The Recycling at Cal Team tabled during Earth Week and provided outreach
and surveys related to its project and the culture of recycling at Cal. A new
recycling bin design was approved by all stakeholders. A 3D mock up was built
and placed on Sproul Plaza to assure the size was appropriate; it was. The team
was finishing up the academic year by working on making shop drawings of the
bins. After these drawings are complete, the team will have a campus welder
make a prototype. The bins have received approval from the CRAB committee
for meeting ADA standards.
Project Leads:
Michal Shuldman
Graduate Student,
Department of Integrative Biology
Philippe Marchand
Graduate Student
Water Metering and Conservation
Awarded $56,000
The Water Metering and Conservation team has completely handed off the
building-scale water meter connections to Obvius and PPCS. The team
members’ new task is to continue check-ups on the progress of the installations
as they begin audits and submitting orders for the next phase (TGIF grant 2010)
of their project.
Regarding sub-metering and toilets in Wurster Hall, they have had the help of 4
civil engineering undergraduates with using the ultrasonic water meter to audit
the water consumption of toilets in Wurster Hall. They need to collect some more
data before deciding which fixtures to replace with the high efficiency toilets
and urinals. By June, the team was nearing the end of discussions with PPCS to
determine which sub-meters to order for fine-scale metering of Wurster Hall, and
was working with an undergraduate electrical engineering student to set up the
wireless sensor network for collecting and viewing data.
Project Leads:
Lindsay Miller
Eliot Nahman
2008 Grant Awards
Strawberry Creek Native Plant Nursery and Garden
Awarded $12,865
During the week of May 10th, interviews were held with interested students to fill
the position of Nursery Coordinator for the summer months; student David Pon
was selected and he was formally hired. On May 11th and 12th 2010, irrigation
plumbers from PP-CS Grounds, along with
a backhoe operator from PP-CS Utilities,
installed pipe chases for the irrigation
service to both the nursery shadestructure as well as the demonstration
native plants garden plot. SCNPN is now
operational thanks to the PP-CS Irrigation
crew getting water to the shade house.
As of June 1, 2010, work yet to be completed included purchasing and installing
flame resistant black shade cloth on the shade structure, installation of an
automatic drip/mist irrigation system and a packed decomposed granite
pathway, planting of border plants and specimen plants, and purchasing of
worker and coordinator office cabinets.
Project Leads:
Tim Pine
Karl Hans
UC Berkeley Campus Dashboard
Awarded $76,750
The permanent display panels for the FSM Café Interactive Install have been
designed and re-designed based on user feedback, and a third effort is now
under way. Wurster Hall’s install has been completed and has a touch screen for
viewing current and past Wurster Hall energy and water usage. Unrealistic levels
of technical complexity and inconsistent student labor have caused delays in
the delivery of a smart, durable, and informative set of boards. Final signage
design and interactive components are still in progress. Ongoing development,
maintenance and redesign of website are being conducted by Sam Borgeson.
Project Leads:
Sam Borgeson
PhD Student,
Energy and Resources Group
Omar Khan
Graduate Student,
Computer Science
University Hall: Going Green! LEED-EBOM
Awarded $10,000
Appliance Replacement: A total of 11 refrigerators were disposed of and
replaced with 7 energy star model refrigerators based on the appliance audit
conducted by Building Sustainability @ Cal during 2008-2009. In addition, the 3rd
floor breakroom inefficient coffee maker and hotplate were replaced with an
energy efficient model coffee maker and electric hot water kettle.
Task Lighting: Approximately 300 task lights were purchased and distributed to
building occupants. This resulted in increased enthusiasm in building occupants,
and reduced usage of overhead lighting, which had energy saving and
ergonomic benefits. The distribution of task lights fulfilled a LEED Credit for Existing
Buildings, Operations & Maintenance Certification (IEQ credit 2.2).
Window Film Pilot Project: This project is in the beginning phases. Two offices on
the 3rd floor have been retrofitted with window film with good results. Feedback
from the occupants suggested that the window film helped to reduce heat
loading in the summer as well as glare from direct sun. This summer, the
remaining offices on 3rd floor will be retrofitted with window film.
Outreach / Education: Two “Green
Coffee Hour” events have been held in
the building, one each year since TGIF
granted the building funding. The
University Hall “Green Coffee Hour” has
been an event where occupants can
come
and
gather
to
discuss
sustainability- both for in the office and
at home- and enjoy a mid-afternoon
snack and coffee. The event includes
educational material showcases by vendors in the sustainable field) and
campus groups which support sustainability.
The University Hall Going Green! project has plans to complete the two
outstanding project components (Outreach/Education and Window Film Pilot
Project) by Fall, 2010. Pending results of the building commissioning, University
Hall is planning on submitting documentation for LEED-EBOM certification by
January, 2011.
Project Leads:
Rebecca Anderson
Environmental Specialist,
EH&S
Janis Honda
Public Health
Ian Baldridge
Radiation Safety Technician,
EH&S