Category: Blog

December 4, 2011

Post from Alison Queen

I thought the presentation on Thursday went really well! Everyone really came together and did their part. We all had something important to contribute and I thought the meetings and sessions worked out nicely. I think we were a good team. It felt really good to feel like we accomplished something that might actually be of some significance, yanno? It’s certainly not everyday in college that I walk away from a project feeling this good about something I had spent my time doing for the past couple months. I learned a lot about recycling, the recycling situation on campus, and what it means in relation to sustainability. This process even taught me a lot about my own habits. I thought I was a lot more “green” than I really am. Well, the first step is awareness, so…at least I’m off to a decent start. I’m excited to talk about and implement what I learned on this recycling project, and what I learned listening to everyone else’s presentations. I thought everyone did a really good job and really wanted to impress Fisher. This is project I won’t soon forget.

December 2, 2011

Post from Elizabeth Pappas

This week (Nov. 28- Dec. 2) we made sure all of our data was correct and went over our findings together as a group in order to make a presentation. We looked at our data sets that we found from the bike chalking, and talked about what these findings meant. We found that the bike racks by Bellsouth and the business center are largely used for storage, while the ones by Maybank/RSS were used more frequently and did not remain as long. Our group then put together a presentation during which we went over the procedures of both parts of our projects, and also how our findings contribute to sustainability on campus. Overall, we were all happy with the work we did, although we don’t have a final product yet (the GIS map is being worked on), we found out a lot about campus bike use through our findings and hopefully our data can be used in order to create a more sustainable future for bikers on CofC’s campus.

December 2, 2011

Post from Eliora Guillory

Now that our semester is coming to an end, so is our part of the recycling project. I think we have all worked together really well in getting this project started. Although we didn’t finish it in its entirety, I think we got a lot accomplished. We made maps of recycling bins in the major buildings, and monitored them. In my opinion, I think the monitoring process should have been more standardized. Since we weren’t sure when the recycling was being picked up by the janitors, it could have affected our results. Also, the times we went could have skewed the results as well. We spoke about this in our group meeting. Some of us considered morning monitoring to be at 7:30 am, while others checked at 11 am for morning. It should have been more standardized for better results. Besides that, I think this was a good project. It made us realize that bins should be more strategically placed around campus. Also, when I was monitoring bins I saw a lot of wrong items in the bins. For example, there would be paper in the plastic bins. Although it seems simple enough not to put paper in a plastic bin, maybe we should better inform campus about why it is important to make sure to put your recyclables in the correct bin. This project was very informative for me.

December 1, 2011

Posts from Clair Hollingsworth and Rosemary Norman

Having been very familiar with social media, as most college students are, I was excited to be offered the opportunity to advertise the College’s Office of Sustainability. We considered which media outlets would be the most effective way to get the word out about the office as well as keeping people informed about events and ways to live more sustainable and decided that we should focus on the two largest social media forums right now: Facebook and Twitter. The Office of Sustainability already had a page that people could “like” which we could post events, pictures, and relevant material on this page and the people that have liked our page would get updates in their News Feed. We thought that this was a great way to create a fanbase for the office but considering it only had 30 or so people having liked it when we were given this project we knew that we had some work to do. We both advertised the office’s page to friends, classmates, and the rest of the Facebook world and soon had at least 80 people liking the page. We were very excited about the success of the page and turned to making a group on Facebook where people could be more actively involved and get more notifications about postings. We quickly realized that most people on Facebook don’t appreciate constant notifications from our group, or any group really, and decided to turn our focus to Twitter. The Office had already made a twitter account (@SustainableCofC) and had a few followers. We started following other sustainability minded accounts as well as local Charleston retailers, newspapers, and school associations. We tweeted about events, our Facebook page, and we tweeted sustainable tips for our followers. We even tweeted quotes about sustainability. At this point we have about 40 followers and counting. While we’ve definitely had a few setbacks in promoting the College’s Office of Sustainability we also had an opportunity to learn effective techniques in advertising our page and Twitter. Hopefully the likes and followers will continue to grow and the word gets out to everyone that our Office of Sustainability is up and running.

~Clair

The social media project for the Office of Sustainability has been an interesting focus. The two main social media networks we focused on were Facebook and Twitter. The College of Charleston Office of Sustainability page on Facebook had already been established so we focused on expanding that page. We experimented with also creating a group, separate from the page, that was named Sustainable CofC. The CofC Office of Sustainability was not too large, it had about 36 likes. Our goal was to get to at least 75 likes and currently we have gotten to 80! This has been through word of mouth by sharing it and by increasing the amount of information posted on the wall (mainly photos, events and current news). This page turned out to be better than the Sustainable CofC group because it was easily accessible to Facebook users. The next main focus was in the Twitter account. Twitter is an easy to access and is limited in how much the users can write, making it an amusing thing to look at from people or groups that the users follow. Our user name is SustainableCofC and we focused on following many other school’s offices as well as local and nationwide news sources. In turn, we would reshare current events pertaining to sustainability while also utilizing Twitter as a way to spread word of campus events within the office. We have seen a large increase in followers, making the office, thus, more popular through its Twitter account.

~Rosemary

November 29, 2011

Post from Katie Thomason

Our urban agriculture group has come across a few problems. We originally planned to builld a vertical garden on the roof of Liberty residence hall. We had a few issues, however, with gaining access to this location. We then were fortunate to gain a new location- the roof of the MES office on King St. We redesigned our structure to be a 8 x 2ft box where we would plant things like thyme, collards, fava beans, and beets. This project was meant to be an experiment to see what worked and what didn’t so we could expand/improve it in the future. Once we decided on this new plan we sent in a proposal to try to gain funding and planned to build this week. We recently encountered another problem, however: we did not gain funding. We are in a very tight time crunch and will gather today to figure out our next steps from here, hoping for the best.

November 29, 2011

Posts by Jon McMurray and Alison Queen

Hey guys! Jon here. Sorry this update is coming so late but I’ve been having technical difficulties, I had another nice little video planned for you all, but for some reason, technology is just not agreeing with me. Anywho, this past week we completed the monitoring phase of our project! Very exciting! Really there wasn’t much to it other then going up to a select few recycling/trash bins around campus and recording how full the were. What we’re really trying to figure out, is how much recycling is actually used on campus rather then people just throwing everything in the garbage (which, as I am told, some people actually do! crazy, right?). Anyway, we kept close tabs on these bins for the last week, and now comes the fun part, making sense of all the data! So stay tuned!

~Jon

This whole process has been very interesting! I don’t think I can say that I’ve been apart of something this “hands on” since I’ve been at this college. I’m really learning first hand how serious the problems are that we face. I picked the recycling group because that is the area I am most interested in. I am NOT a political science major, nor would I consider it one of my strong points. I would even go as far to say that, before entering this class, I knew close to nothing about sustainability (just like most Americans, and this lack of education is one of the biggest problems). I am grateful to have learned so much in just this one class. Everyone seems to offer some truly insightful ideas. Just mapping the recycling bins was a shocking experience for me. I was horrified to learn how few recycling bins are in our buildings. I thought for sure, for some reason, there would be a lot more. This did a lot to light the sustainability fire in my heart. I want to take steps to do what I can to put more and better recycling bins on campus. Monitoring the bins was a whole other story. This wasn’t a difficult task and I really didn’t mind taking 2 seconds out of my day to notice the recycling levels. They don’t seem to be used as much as I thought they would have been. I’m just fortunate to have taken a class where the project is forcing me to notice environmental conditions, note it, and do something about it. I’m really looking forward to seeing all of my groups data put together to see what we’ve come up with.

~Alison

November 24, 2011

Post from Hannah Kuykendall

The newest component to the Greek Life Sustainability project is the composition of a packet with eco-friendly suggestions for the greek organizations. Each sorority and fraternity will receive a packet with solutions to make marketing, carpooling/ traveling, service ware, decorating, and food beverage more sustainable within the greek community. This packet will include a clear definition of problems with these currents practices as well as four potential solutions. In addition, we plan to contact the various RA’s of each greek house and conduct a survey of their houses. In these surveys we will note what is being done with a sustainable conscious and what practices can be improved. As members of greek life, we are all very excited to implement change. Because each of these problems is being addressed by members within the greek community, we believe these are problems that can be fixed.

November 21, 2011

Post from Kenny Good

Kyle and I were able to meet with Jan Brewton, Director of Parking Services at the College of Charleston, and subsequently Vonie Gilreath, Mobility Manager of BCDCOG on the respective dates of November 4th and 18th. Both discussions have been very helpful in our implementation of a RideShare program here at CofC. Ms. Brewton and Ms. Gilreath showed genuine excitement about our aspirations and were able to giveus valuable insights on both the possibilities and limitations.

Jan Brewton explained sources of funding as well as the process of surveying students and collecting data regarding transportation at the collegiate scale, while Vonie Gilreath provided us with information dealing with the bureaucratic process at the city and regional scale as well as the website structure of Trident Rideshare. We hope to continue our group’s relationship with these two experienced and knowledgeable professionals in our goal of making transportation more sustainable here at College of Charleston.

November 18, 2011

Post by Allison Terry

This week we’ve been working on getting in touch with presidents and house managers of various sororities and fraternities on campus. We hope to set dates and times to go into the houses and do an initial sustainability audit. It has been a hectic week for many sororities and fraternities, as many are voting in a new executive council. When things settle down we will be able to get back on track with setting up audit dates. In the mean time, we are working on putting together a comprehensive reference packet to guide Greek life in hosting sustainable events. We will be addressing issues such as transportation, food, and decorating. We will be outlining various current issues surrounding the topics and offer several sustainable solutions. Hopefully this packet will encourage sustainable practices across Greek life. We are really excited about getting this project up and running, and we hope to instill that excitement in the Greek community.

November 17, 2011

Post from Jenny Bamond

Christina, Katy, and I recently took a trip out to The Sustainable Warehouse to price materials and budget for our rooftop garden. The trip was definitely worthwhile. We not only found many materials we could use for our project, but also learned about what is being done in the community to help make building practices more sustainable. Director of The Sustainable Warehouse, Rebecca, and her team deconstruct old buildings, salvaging materials that can be reused for other projects. Their goal is to relieve the burdens on the landfills. The Sustainable Warehouse is where anybody from a contractor to a student like us can go and “upcycle” materials instead of using additional natural resources for new materials.

Rebecca was very helpful in finding materials to use for our rooftop garden. She has a lot of “garden-grade” wood available that she recommended we use for our raised beds. Right now, this same wood is being upcycled and used in the Chicora Community Garden in North Charleston. We also found several old shelves that might be useful in creating vertical gardens on rooftops such as Liberty Residence Hall. Although not realistic for this particular pilot project, I think something similar to these old shelves would be useful to College of Charleston urban agriculture initiatives in the future. They are built very similar to the vertical wall panels commonly found online, but are by nature much more conducive to our mission of sustainability.