TGIF Program Associate Kareem Hammoud has created a Google Map that displays the campus locations of TGIF funded projects. The map will be located on the TGIF website and each funded project will have its campus location linked on its project page.
View TGIF Project Locations in a larger map
As part of the Earth Week Celebration here at UC Berkeley, we attended the CACS Sustainability Summit. The summit began with a poster session, where sustainability efforts going on all over campus were highlighted by their leaders.
Check out Monica Harnoto’s Poster on her Chews to Reuse program, increasing sustainability with Cal Dining. She was a key player behind Cal Dining’s conversion to reusable to-go containers, which resulted in a huge victory for waste reduction! She was honored with a Sustainability Award at the summit, along with Kira Stoll, Arpad Horvath and Nature Village.
Other impressive posters and projects included:
Waste Not, Want Not: Zero Waste Events at Cal, with student leader Katie Clabeaux
Berkeley Student Food Collective Food Prep Expansion, with Carli Baker and Bernadette Robison
A very fun and informative event, the CACS Sustainability Summit is a time for sustainability at Cal to shine!
Article by TGIF Program Associate Erlin Sweeney
At Cal there are a lot of reasons to love tap water. It’s sourced from Sierra Nevada snowmelt, it’s clean, it tastes good, it’s sustainable, and it’s free! However, two barriers still drive students to purchase single use water bottles — lack of knowledge that our tap water is safe and tastes great, and access to tap water sources that make it easy to refill a water container.
Those barriers are starting to fade with several more water bottle refill stations installed throughout the campus. The Green Initiative Fund has funded new refill stations in Sproul Hall (first floor by the visitor center), Wheeler Hall (first floor near room 130), and Kroeber Hall (by the Hearst Museum of Anthropology). Several departments have added refill stations including locations in Barrows Hall ground floor by room 44 and Hearst Gymnasium next to the west entrance.
TGIF also funded bottle fillers installed on existing ADA-compliant water fountains, a cost-effective solution allowing more installations in more buildings. You can find bottle fillers on fountains in the ASUC, Doe Library, Tan Hall, Latimer, Pimentel, LeConte, Cory, GPB, LSA, and VLSB. See the google map of refill stations on campus in publically-accessible locations. You can also take the “I Heart Tap Water” Pledge here!
-article originally published by Trish Ratto in the May issue of Bright Green News from the Office of Sustainability
The Green Initiative Fund at UC Berkeley will be thoroughly represented at the 2013 California Higher Education Sustainability Conference. Five TGIF projects have been selected to presented and one project will be receiving a Best Practices Award.
The following presentations have been selected to present:
Congratulations to PowerSave Campus at UC Berkeley for winning the 2013 Student Energy Efficiency Best Practice Award for its TGIF funded project Fight the Flow. The Berkeley PowerSave Team will receive their award in June at the 2013 California Higher Education Sustainability Conference. This is the 2nd year in a row Berkeley PowerSave has won the award for leading a TGIF funded project. The 2012 Award was for Green Cup Competition.
CHESC 2013 will be held at UC Santa Barbara June 23rd-26th. Registration details can be found here.
On Monday, April 22, some UC Berkeley students gathered on Sproul in support of the California Modernization and Economic Development Act (CMED), a current ballot proposal. This Act proposes a 9.5% extraction tax on oil and natural gas, which will provide between 2 and 2.5 billion dollars in revenue to education, small businesses, California state parks, and general California government use. “CMED will reverse the trend of deregulation of oil companies,” said Nolan Pack, ASUC Senator. He emphasized the importance of education for the upward mobility opportunities that America was built on. This is especially true in California, where we were once the leader in education but have changed that to being one of the leaders in unemployment.
Jack Tibbetts, the campaign manager, explained how the proposed ballot initiative will lead to less unemployment. “We can’t wait for tomorrow. We have to start today.” He specifically mentioned the Monterey Shale reserve, which holds a huge untapped supply of natural gas. “It’s no longer a matter of if they’ll get this oil. It’s a matter of when they get this oil. We must be sure that we can get some of the benefit of this oil, and end the free handout of oil wealth.”
CMED has received a number of endorsements, including endorsements from UC Berkeley Professors Dan Kammen and Robert Reich.
-article by Claire Kaufman, TGIF Program Associate
