History and Justice and Peace Studies

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 () 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:
1.Project Title: EXPANSION OF UST ON-CAMPUS COMPOSTING INITIATIVE
2.Primary Applicant:
Quinn Wrenholt
Environmental Science dept.
Senior Student

(952) 564-8165

Elizabeth Phyle

Junior Student

(612) 220-2805

3.Secondary Applicant (Optional, if primary applicant is faculty or staff):
Chester Wilson
Biology dept.
Professor

(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’svermiculture 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 on-campus 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 vermicultureactually 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 sub-committee 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: Elizabeth- Ratio 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:

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.

B. We received the following support for our project.