Blue Goes Green panel hears props
USU students met in the West Colony room of the TSC Thursday to present their proposals of how to make campus more environmentally friendly.
The six proposals were presented in front of a board of members compiled from different school departments. The board is in charge of the Blue Goes Green Grant money and was looking for candidates to help get their ideas off their feet and running.
The first proposal came from the Living and Learning Community. Kayla Dinsdale, site coordinator for Together Everyone Achieves More in Logan, is working with LLC Resident Director Timothy Ledna to try and create a “Campus to Community Sustainability Competition.”
This program proposal will match each LLC building to a different high school TEAM club. Working with the high school students as prospective future USU students, they will hold monthly activities to increase awareness of sustainability.
Prizes will be awarded each month to the winning team with a larger prize awarded to the overall winning team at the end of the school year. The requested funds for this proposal is $4,535.
The following group presented their proposal of “Psychological Mechanisms of ‘Green’ Behavior.” With this project, graduate students Brady DeHart, Salif Mahamane and Jonathan Friedel will work with other students to take pictures of Cache Valley on different days to compare the air quality.
They will study the psychological affects of green behavior and with their different implemented programs will work to increase the air quality in the valley. DeHart, Mahamane and Friedel requested $2,745 for their project.
Crista Sorenson and Roslynn Brain proposed “Aggie Village Compost.” With this project, they will bring in two compost bins to hold in Aggie Village to fertilize community gardens. The goal is to decrease the amount of waste deposited by USU on a daily basis.
Sorenson and Brain are hopeful that after piloting their project they will be able to expand to the rest of the school and its students. This team is requesting $550 for their proposal.
Group four proposed “Water and Energy Conservation through High-Efficient Automatic Faucets.” The goal of this project is to replace 12 older hand faucet sinks on campus with new automatic faucets in an attempt to conserve more water.
Adel M. Abdallah is requesting $5,900 to fund the new faucets.
Student Matthew Stapp proposed that in order to decrease the pollution and better the air quality in Cache Valley, the Aggie bus system needs to be involved. The current bike racks on the buses each hold two bikes. With this limitation, students are turned away daily due to the bike rack being full.
Stapp is working with the bus system to request $2,876 in funds in order to replace the bike racks with larger ones so that more bikes can be accommodated.
The final proposal was “Season Extension Hoop House.” This proposal is from the Community Supported Agriculture club. Their goal is to build a Hoop House that will allow them to plant their produce earlier in the year to allow for more goods to be sold for a longer period of time rather than only summer. They requested $2,558.
The grant in total has $10,270 to help fund these proposals. A total of $19,124 has been requested. The groups will find out this week what the verdict is for their proposal.
– lori_schafer@yahoo.com