Tiny House in My Backyard (THIMBY) is an interdisciplinary team of 27 UC Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students designing and constructing affordable, ecologically sustainable, tiny homes. THIMBY 3.0, the third home constructed by the THIMBY organization, will be piloting Richmond’s “Tiny House on Wheels Pilot Project” ordinance, which the team recently helped renew, by constructing and leasing an affordable, net-zero-energy 240 sq ft. house in the backyard of a predetermined single-family residence in Richmond. In collaboration with the City...
This designathon aims to empower students to share their voices on decisions about the campus food system, because it should be catered to their needs and values. The Pour Out Pepsi campaign pressures the UC Berkeley administration to end the exclusive pouring rights contract with PepsiCo due to its unsustainable and inequitable practices. There are currently discussions in the UCOP about establishing a UC system-wide exclusive pouring rights contract, likely with PepsiCo or Coca-Cola, demonstrating that they value profit over students. The food and beverage...
The ASUC Eco-Office is comprised of 7 departments, including Pour out Pepsi, UC Green New Deal, Environmental Education, Environmental Justice Campaigns, Eco-Community Development, Social Media & Graphics, and Legislative Affairs. Each is headed by directors who coordinate and organize their respective departments. The directors spend roughly 5-7 hours a week leading their department and performing tasks including attending senior staff meetings, hosting department meetings, maintaining logistics and organization of their department, etc....
Vertical Farming at Berkeley is requesting funds in order to research detergent-degrading bacteria to purify water for their farm. Their future goal is to supply fresh produce to eateries like Cal Dining.
The Hispanic Engineers and Scientists organization requests funds to pay for garden managers, supplies, and workshops, as well as a mini-fund to support internal projects, within their rooftop garden.
Vertical Farming at Berkeley is seeking funds to support research on oyster mushrooms, which are alternative food sources that can reduce food inequity. They will be researching how to create a mushroom resistant to the Trichoderma mold, and hope that their strain can eventually be used in campus dining halls as a meat alternative.
VFB is seeking funds to create a sustainable biofuel from microalgae. Their goal is to create a model for growing renewable fuels with low carbon impacts and to eventually generate algae for Berkeley research labs and support future research into sustainably grown algae.
In Spring 2025, it will have been 10 years since the founding of the Students of Color Environmental Collective (SCEC), a campus student organization that has helped pave the way for environmental justice conversations on UC Berkeley’s campus. In celebration of this anniversary and in an effort to honor BIPOC voices and labor in the environmental movement, we intend to host a BIPOC Earth Day Festival. It will take place in Spring 2025 just a few days before Earth Day (likely August 19th, 2025) and will be a half-day outdoor event featuring guest speakers, eco-...
The Island Justice Fellows Program at the Critical Pacific Island Studies Collective (CPISC) enables UC Berkeley students to contribute to environmental justice practice, research, and campus community engagement opportunities concerning issues facing Pacific Islander (PI) communities, both residing in the Pacific Island region and in the diaspora in California. This year-long fellowship programs supports a team of graduate and undergraduate students to address multiple gaps on the UC Berkeley campus: (1) the lack of institutional support for...
For the past decade, the Biofuels Technology Club has been collecting waste cooking oil from campus dining halls to convert it into biodiesel. This process has significant pitfalls such as waste glycerol production and variable diesel quality. This project aims to solve these issues by using algal biomass as a secondary source for both biodiesel and bioethanol. The waste glycerol serves as nutrient-rich feedstock for the algae boosting intracellular lipid content that can be converted into diesel. The leftover algal biomass after lipid extraction can be further...