In honor of World Water Day on March 22, UVA Sustainability’s Green Tip for March focuses on how making the switch to a reusable water bottle from plastic disposable ones can save you money, protect your health and help the planet.
For more information on what UVA is doing to conserve water, click here.
Bright, shiny graphic after the break …
UVA Sustainability’s February Green Tip offers ideas for recycling on the go.
Just in time for the 2013 Recyclemania competition, UTS passengers can now toss recyclable materials including plastics, metals and glass into the blue bags located at the front of the buses. For information about Recyclemania and UTS on-board recycling, see the UVA Today article.
“Charlottesville Inside Out,” a local public TV series, recently did an extended segment on U.Va.’s Bay Game, which has earned acclaim (and funding) as a great tool for learning about the environmental, political and economic complexity of watersheds.
(And yes, that is Charlottesville’s own outstanding singer, Terri Allard, hosting the show.)
Did you know the volume of household waste in the United States generally increases 25 percent between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day? UVA Sustainability’s December Green Tip offers ideas for having a greener holiday season.
This holiday season, consider fun alternatives to purchasing new items that could end up in the landfill. Experiential gifts such as a trip to a museum or concert or even homemade items like jams or knitted hats are great alternative gifts. Want to give a gift that keeps on giving? Consider donating to charities on behalf of others or ask others to donate to your favorite charity in lieu of presents.
For ore facts about waste during the holidays, click here.
As we gather at our Thanksgiving banquet tables there will be favorite dishes contributed by family members and friends — a sweet potato casserole from Aunt Sue, an apple pie from Grandma, a brined turkey Uncle Bob prepared.
But, where did all that food really come from?
Ever wonder about what to do with unwanted electronic devices? UVA Sustainability’s November Green Tip gives you the inside scoop on electronic recycling (e-cycling) at U.Va.
Did you know that the average American household owns approximately 24 electronic products? That is 2,741,663,904 electronic devices in the U.S. that could end up in landfills unless properly recycled.
To keep these materials out of landfills, UVA Recycling has created an extensive “E-cycling” program to reduce waste and conserve resources. For convenience, UVA Recycling provides eight e-cycling receptacles (listed here) across Grounds. To recycle electronics in an office, simply label a box with “e-cycling” and place inside your recycling office area for the UVA Recycling staff to collect.
If you’re unsure about an item, simply call UVA Recycling at 982-5050 for guidance.
To recycle your household electronics, click here.
The imperative: President Obama issued an executive order in 2009 mandating that action be taken to mitigate the impact of nutrient run-off on the Chesapeake Bay.
The question: Which of the existing best management practices had the most potential to achieve the objective?
The idea: The Computing for Sustainable Water Project, led by U.Va. environmental scientist Gerald Learmonth, which sought to evaluate the possible measures through a massive computer simulation.
The problem: How do you simulate and evaluate the effectiveness of so many possibilities over a huge watershed? Even using all of the computing resources currently available to him at U.Va., it would likely take 90 years to perform all of the calcuations.
The solution: Enter IBM’s World Community Grid, which harnesses the power of the computers of 600,000 volunteers in 80 countries.
The results: The World Community Grid began crunching the numbers on April 17. On Wednesday, exactly six months later, IBM announced that it had finished the calculations, having “processed over 24 million results which required nearly 4,200 years of computing power.”
Next steps: Now it is up to the grateful researchers (here’s their thank-you post on the World Community Grid blog) to pore over the mountains of data that were created and come up with their recommendations for real actions to save the Bay. “We will certainly share these results with you and the wider community as quickly as possible,” they pledged.
And once they’re done with that, they hope to apply their model to other watersheds around the world.
The latest is a monthly series of Green Tips from UVA Sustainability:
Just in time for Halloween, UVA Sustainability brings you a Green Tip that will make your electric bill less scary.
Did you know that many electronic devices consume energy even when in “off” or “standby” mode? According to the EPA, these “energy vampires” cost the average U.S. household $100 annually. In one year, the United States consumes 100 billion kilowatt hours of electricity to power these devices, totaling more than $10 billion in energy costs.
The good news is there’s an easy way to slay energy vampires. Plug electronic devices such as cell phone chargers, game consoles and computers into power strips that are easily accessible. When electronics are not in use, switch off the power strip and rest easy knowing there are no energy vampires in your house.
Our friends over at the UVA Innovation blog are reporting that U.Va.’s acclaimed Bay Game is getting some national exposure. Philippe Cousteau, son of Jacques and a major Bay Game backer, will lead two Bay Game simulation sessions at the SXSW Eco festival in Austin, Texas. The festival runs Oct. 3-5.
Cool stuff.
Today, we welcome the first of a monthly series of Green Tips from U.Va. Sustaiinability.
Want to help the environment while also enjoying good food? Newly posted to the “Sustainability at the University of Virginia” website is a Green Tip of the Month flier that offers tips on how to explore Charlottesville’s City Market. The flier is the first in a new series this year that will offer tips on how to incorporate sustainable practices into our daily lives. To show your commitment to sustainability, be creative! Use the flier as your desktop background or post a copy in the kitchen.
The University of Virginia reduced its electric consumption by 10.8 megawatts on a sweltering Tuesday afternoon.
The reduction came at the request of PJM Interconnection, which oversees the electric grid in Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and parts of North Carolina. At about 1 p.m., PJM requested the University reduce it’s electrical draw by 10 megawatts starting at 4 p.m. to prevent overloading the regional electrical grid during a heat wave.
Employees cut consumption by turning off lights and unnecessary equipment and unplugging computers. Several buildings were taken off the grid and operated with generators, including the Main Heat Plant, the South Chiller Plant, Medical Research Building 5, the Clark Hall addition and Wildsorf Hall, according to Ed Brooks, an engineering technician with Facilities Management.
UVA Today’s Jane Ford reports:
The 10-room school, which opened in 2010, provides access to quality education to elementary school children in the first-ever permanent school within a nine-mile radius.
At the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, Building Tomorrow committed to launching BT 2.0, an initiative aimed at enrolling 15,000 primary-level students annually in 60 Building Tomorrow academies by 2016 throughout East Africa.
Canfora said he is leading a design studio this fall to develop a second school design to be built in 2013.
For more information about Clinton’s visit, click here.
UVA Today has written about U.Va.’s “Breathe House” in the past. Now comes word, via U.Va. Innovation’s “What’s Next” blog, that the house has been assembled in Haiti. A big congratulations to Anselmo Canfora and the team that is making this disaster-recovery housing project a major success!
The summer is a quieter time on Grounds (if you overlook all the construction that’s going on).
But out at Morven Farm, the U.Va. Foundation-owned property about 20 miles away, things are hopping. Two intensive, three-credit courses are meeting out there, part of the second block of the Morven Summer Institute. Both have to do with food systems — “Food and Nutrition in a Changing World” and “Farmer’s Markets and Applied Food Systems Research.”
Read all about them on the institute’s blog.
The photo above shows what was found behind a cornice on Kerchof Hall, home of the Department of Mathematics — and, appropriately enough, to “Bee School,” described as “an informal seminar at the University of Virginia on the mathematics of honeybee behavior and the practice of beekeeping. It’s part academic pursuit and part social activity, honoring the University’s unique tradition of close student-faculty friendship.” It’s led by Christian Gromoll, an associate professor of mathematics.
Gromoll’s nicely illustrated post on the Bee School blog tells the whole story of extracting the huge hive from Kerchof. In the end, Gromoll and his helpers collected about four pounds of bees, a large broodnest and 145 pounds of honeycomb out of the building. The bees were relocated to Gromoll’s bee yard.
