The Green Innovation Grants, aka GIGs, are relatively small sums awarded to Bates students, staff, and faculty for projects that make Bates more environmentally sustainable \u2014 often in surprising ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For its fourth year, the program funded seven projects, ranging from $150 for helping birds avoid window collisions to the total of $3,600 for two proposals for supplanting paper towels with electric dryers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The GIG program was designed to encourage Bates folks, especially students, to become active stakeholders in advancing sustainability at the college. \u201cThe opportunity to have some ownership of how the college runs, even in small ways, can give students the power to feel like they can address larger issues,\u201d says Emma Wheeler \u201920 of Bergen, Norway, who with Stringer proposed one of the hand dryer projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAt Bates, just because it’s such a close-knit, smaller community, this kind of funding \u2014 while it may seem small compared to other schools \u2014 and these projects have a much larger impact campus-wide,\u201d says Stringer. \u201cWe feel the impact of every single project.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tom Twist, Bates\u2019 sustainability manager, points out a few themes that this round\u2019s successful projects, all of which were proposed by students, have in common. One is attempting to mitigate the campus waste stream. In particular, as they have in past years, students are showing a strong interest in finding ways to recycle problematic items.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the most eye-opening ideas came from Henri Emmet \u201921 of New York City. He received a $240 grant to establish a means of recycling a notoriously hard-to-recycle waste material, plastic foam such as Styrofoam. Emmet\u2019s solution: raising larvae of the beetle species Zophobas morio<\/em>, which not only eat foam but are nourished by it and reduce it to harmless organic matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An environmental studies major and member of Bates\u2019 track and cross country teams, Carly Harris \u201922 of Orinda, Calif., proposed a collection box for worn-out athletic shoes in Merrill Gym. Once filled, the box will go to a company that deals with tough-to-recycle products. Previous GIGs have paid companies such as TerraCycle, of Trenton, N.J., to recycle nitrile gloves and wrappers from snack foods such as chips and energy bars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shoes, Twist explains, tend to be what recycling experts call \u201cmonstrous hybrids\u201d \u2014 they combine different types of material in a way that makes recycling them difficult and expensive. Harris\u2019 program, he says, \u201cis nice because it funds the dissection of your typical shoe so that it can be recycled.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Harris finds that she goes through about four pairs of athletic shoes annually. And according to her GIG proposal, Bates\u2019 850 or so student athletes each year use up at least 1,000 pairs of athletic shoes, which have historically ended up in the landfill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This year\u2019s grants also demonstrate that \u201cstudents are really getting more involved in the infrastructure of campus,\u201d says Twist. He adds, \u201cThat\u2019s what we had hoped would happen\u201d with the program. \u201cIt shows a sophistication on their part to start to look at the built environment and how to change it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For instance, four students proposed the installation of bathroom light controls in the three dorms of the Residential Village. Apparently designed to be lit 24\/7 when the dorms were built, in the early 1990s, the bathrooms were never equipped with on-off switches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, Mia Shifrin \u201923 of Weld, Maine, and Amelia Keleher \u201921 of Corrales, N.M., members of the EcoReps\u2019 campus garden group, received some $1,500 for facilities at the college\u2019s vegetable garden that will make the space more useful for informal and formal education. This will help realize an early goal for the garden<\/a>, aka The Plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking on the campus wastestream and infrastructure too, the Stringer-Wheeler project is part of a greater EcoRep plan to convert a total of 38 towel dispensers in five buildings \u2014 the Page, Adams, Parker, and Rand residences, as well as Chase \u2014 to dryers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paper hand towels account for more than a third of the waste from residential buildings with paper towel dispensers, Stringer and Wheeler wrote in their proposal (which will pay for the installation of two already-purchased dryers in the restrooms that serve the Bobcat Den. The other project is for four dryers in Rand Hall.) And the towels can\u2019t be composted and must be sent to the local landfill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moreover, the pair stated, for just the five buildings in the EcoRep study, the college spends upward of $21,000 annually on paper towel-related expenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first-year cost of the conversion for the five buildings would be close to $78,000 \u2014 but the annual operating cost of the dryers would be $600. After five years, they predicted, Bates would save about $105,000, and after 10 years, about $210,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to the savings both in dollars and waste, the dryers make life easier for the custodians and for the crews who pick up trash from the buildings. The students \u201ctook everything into account, really \u2014 the cost of buying paper towels, cost of disposing of them, the labor involved in having to manage all the paper towels, etc.,\u201d says Twist. \u201cIt was really nicely done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, Twist points out, the EcoReps\u2019 fact-finding in the case of towels vs. dryers has come to the attention of the college\u2019s capital planners, \u201cto see if we could do that on a wider scale, because it has such a favorable payback.\u201d He adds, \u201cIt’s pretty staggering. And no one really knew before the students did some work on it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the GIG program has progressed from year to year, \u201cwe’ve seen a lot of increasingly practical projects that are very well-documented and thought-through,\u201d Twist says. \u201cAnd that also shows an increasing sophistication beyond just, \u2018Wouldn’t this idea be nice?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe students are doing a really good job in making a hard case for these things to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Proposal<\/strong> (two combined): Replace paper towels with hand dryers in Chase and Rand halls Proposal<\/strong>: Place stickers on 280 College Street glass walls to increase their visibility to birds Proposal<\/strong>: Breed insect larvae (Zophobas morio<\/em>) that consume and digest plastic foams such as Styrofoam Proposal<\/strong>: Place a collection box in the Merrill Gym lobby to collect discarded athletic footwear for recycling Proposal<\/strong>: Furnish Ladd Library with \u201cstapleless\u201d staplers Proposal<\/strong>: Standardize waste collection facilities among Bates dorms Proposal<\/strong>: Create facilities for informal and formal education in the Bates Plot Proposal<\/strong>: Install bathroom lighting controls in the Residential Village From plastic-eating worms to stapleless staplers, Bates’ Green Innovation Grants support surprising \u2014 and surprisingly effective \u2014 sustainability projects. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":131294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[232,195,217,224,234,11009],"tags":[3125,11532,7372,12302],"class_list":["post-131118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment-sustainability","category-news-politics","category-science-technology","category-society-culture","category-teaching-education","category-the-college","tag-ecoreps","tag-green-innovation-grants","tag-recycling","tag-the-plot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131118"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142904,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131118\/revisions\/142904"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Caroline](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2020\/02\/200227_Green_Grant_5041.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"I](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2020\/02\/200227_Green_Grant_5256-900x600.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Bates](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2018\/01\/160112_CCU_Kalperis_Dyson_1165_dlh-900x600.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Caroline](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2020\/02\/200227_Green_Grant_5111.jpg\")
<\/a><\/a>Green Innovation Grants awarded for 2019\u201320<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Submitters<\/strong>: Tamsin Stringer \u201922, Bloomington, Ind.; Emma Wheeler \u201920, Bergen, Norway; Dianna Georges \u201922, Clifton, N.J.; Noah Pott \u201922, Great Barrington, Mass.
Award<\/strong>: $3,600
Goal<\/strong>: Reduce cost of, waste produced by hand-drying at Bates<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Submitter: Adam Banks \u201921, Jamaica Plain, Mass.
Award<\/strong>: $150
Goal<\/strong>: Reduce bird casualties from flying into glass<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Submitter<\/strong>: Henri Emmet \u201921, New York City
Award<\/strong>: $240
Goal<\/strong>: Reduce plastic waste produced by the college<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Submitter<\/strong>: Carly Harris \u201922, Orinda, Calif.
Award<\/strong>: $274
Goal<\/strong>: Reduce the amount of worn-out athletic footwear produced by students and sent to the landfill<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Submitter<\/strong>: Hermione Zhou \u201921, Shenzhen, China
Award<\/strong>: $300
Goal<\/strong>: Reduce one-use consumption of metal staples, make paper more recyclable<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Submitter<\/strong>: Olivia LaMarche \u201920, Lynnfield, Mass.
Award<\/strong>: $767
Goal<\/strong>: Increase amount of waste accepted for recycling by reducing contamination<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Submitters<\/strong>: Mia Shifrin \u201922, Weld, Maine; Amelia Keleher \u201921, Corrales, N.M.
Award<\/strong>: $1,512
Goal<\/strong>: Enhance the Bates Plot’s role as a gathering space, and improve organization and accessibility to the garden for Bates and Lewiston communities<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Submitters<\/strong>: Julia Panepinto \u201920, Buffalo, N.Y.; Olivia McCulloch \u201921, Sunderland, Mass.; Ruby Lightbourn \u201921, Los Angeles; Jared Schell \u201921, Media, Pa.
Award<\/strong>: $1,800
Goal<\/strong>: Conserve energy by turning off lights when bathrooms are empty<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"