Search: Student Projects, Waste Management

This student group will use $1,000 to implement an electricity use awareness campaign, using guerrilla signs and displaying energy usage data online and on existing computer screens in the elevator waiting areas. The other $1,000 will be used to recycle still usable architectural supplies, now thrown out at the end of the semester by students under pressure to vacate studios, so these supplies can now be given to next semester’s incoming architectural students free of charge. This project hopes to take advantage of “the efforts of Paul Black as he works to install real time energy monitoring systems into more and more buildings on campus” or it may come from a novel system designed to automatically process webcam images of the building electric meter made available via the building wireless network, or it may have to come from direct observations of studio light levels or electricity meters. Because student’s major reviews occur at the end of the semester, with only a short time in which to clean out the studio, lots of still usable architectural supplies, including old models, printouts, and assorted materials, are currently trashed at the end of the semester by outgoing students required to leave the studios clean. These materials can now be recycled in large bins to be available free of charge to next semester’s students.

This project is part of the student-led interdisciplinary design organization Berkeley Innovation (BI). Right now the fact that students have one container in their dorm room for all types of trash means the students, when emptying their personal container into the larger residence hall trash cans, are unlikely to take the time to pick out the recyclables from the rest of their trash and deposit the recyclables into the residence halls large recycle containers.