FAYETTEVILLE : Student teams compete to enable UA to go ‘green’
Posted on Tuesday, December 2, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE — Firstyear graduate student Jada Thompson hopes her interest in agricultural economics will dovetail with the University of Arkansas’ goal of going greener.
“Sustainability is a big catchphrase right now,” Thompson, 22, of Prairie Grove said before Fayetteville campus officials pitched their Student Sustainability Competition to a couple of dozen students at a presentation Monday afternoon in the student union ballroom.
Thompson has written a paper on alternative food sources and eating “local.” She and fellow agricultural economics grad students Edison Froelich of Fayetteville and Megan Norton of Lincoln planned to attend the five-hour presentation in rounds to gather information for a possible team entry.
“I love international ag-policy, and things like that,” said Thompson, who earned bachelor of science degrees in poultry science and in agri-business from UA.
And it doesn’t hurt that the university has ponied up a $ 30, 000 purse: Teams ranging from two to eight members each stand to win $ 15, 000 for first prize, $ 10, 000 for second place and $ 5, 000 for third.
In announcing the contest Nov. 12, the university challenged students to craft “practical innovations to address the environmental and energy problems of the 21 st Century by greatly reducing the negative environmental impact of their campus, especially the university’s carbon footprint.”
Each team’s proposal must contain four equally important parts, Nick Brown, who works as the UA Facilities Management’s executive assistant for sustainability, told the audience.
Besides a technology and / or science component, each must provide a communications strategy, policy recommendations and a business plan. Teams are encouraged to form across disciplines so that, say, an engineering student might work with students from business, public relations or political science.
“It’s a sustainability competition — not just an energy conservation competition,” Brown said. It includes issues such as land stewardship, and UA seeks ideas on financial savings, energy savings and environmental impact.
Officials especially want student input on whether, and how, behavior by the university family could be changed, such as turning off unused lights, using smaller classroom spaces or maximizing the use of academic buildings at night.
The prize money will come, not from student tuition or taxpayer funds, but from the proceeds of a $ 300 million gift the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation gave the university more than five years ago, said Suzanne McCray, interim dean of UA’s Honors College. The overall gift included a $ 15 million endowment for undergraduate research that can be used for the competition, she said, adding: “It’s part of the $ 300 million still at work.”
To be eligible, undergraduate and graduate students must successfully complete six credit-hours during the spring 2009 semester. The contest also could earn academic credits if their professors agree, Brown said. The first-, second- and thirdplace teams ultimately must combine their prize-winning ideas into one strategy before they can claim the prize money, he added.
Brown noted that nationally, UA is among a number of universities and colleges that have pledged to make their campuses more sustainable. Though the Fayetteville campus has taken some measures for decades — such as offering mass transit and planting extra trees on campus — more recently it stepped up efforts to go green, he said.
These initiatives include adding more hybrid, electric and “flex-fuel” vehicles to the university fleet, building more buildings to green standards such as LEED, and a program that calls for $ 27 million worth of UA energy savings performance contracts.
“We run the french fry truck,” said Mike Johnson, associate vice chancellor for Facilities Management, formerly the UA Physical Plant. Johnson was referring to a program that ferries UA cafeteria deep-fat-frier oils to other part of campus for use as automotive fuel.
“It’ll be your job to kind of fix things that some of us old geezers have screwed up,” Bob McMath, interim provost, told students in the audience.
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