Week 4: BRAINSTORM!!!

Our meeting with Linda Kurtos was productive in helping us visualize funding our project on campus. She gave us an overview of the university’s Green Loan Fund (GLF) program, which is a revolving loan fund for sustainable initiatives specifically. A necessary component of a GLF is the ability of the payed-for initiative or renovation to pay for itself in savings or new revenue. We think a compost project on campus has potential for both in that it could save the university money on its landfill contracts and generate revenue through the sale of compost. It will be important to further develop these claims later in the design process!

John Glon offered some insight into some of the exciting changes to North Dining Hall and talked of his support for a campus compost program. He expresses concerns about congestion and safety if the program required students to sort their own food but seemed overall quite supportive of such an initiative.

Fun times naming our project (Scraps to Soil) We had a blast brainstorming our project name. Picture a few environmental engineers sitting around in la fun repeating slowly words like “soil”, “resoilcle”, “waste”, “dirt”, “food” & “ND” and trying to rhyme or alliterate phrases over and over. After several minutes and a few good laughs, “Scraps to Soil” emerged from our brainstorming and we quickly agreed that it was a great team name. We wanted a name that captured the fact that the composting facility would produce something quite useful! We wanted to illustrate that composting is dynamic! Thus, “scraps to soil” was born!

Also...we submitted our Project Plan today!!! This document summarizes our goals and plans for this project for the rest of the semester.