RSO Sponsor

These projects were sponsored by a registered student organization

Heated and cooled chairs for comfort

Project Description

Demonstrate the comfort effects of heated/cooled chairs for UCB students, and also their energy benefit, in a total of three campus buildings. The goal is to encourage campus-wide adoption of PCS. The approach is: 1) design and fabricate 10 battery-powered heating/cooling cassettes that attach to chairs on UCB’s purchase list; 2) demonstrate comfort effects for students in a library and a common room in a dorm; 3) quantify the HVAC energy savings potential in one open-plan office space.

Project Links

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Project RISHI Rainwater Harvesting

Project Description

The first goal for our proposed project is hosting a sustainable design and development-focused summit where we will invite UC Berkeley students from diverse backgrounds. This will serve as an opportunity for Berkeley students to apply their skills and knowledge about sustainability to a real-world project, and to raise awareness about water-insecurity projects, development, and technology. Through collaboration with students and organizations across campus, we will redesign our RH system and implementation process, improving their longevity, cost-efficiency, and...

Circularity

Project Description

Circularity fills this void by providing environmental justice learning materials for free -- centering accessibility and actionable steps towards incorporating EJ fundamentals into everyone’s work. In this way, campus organizations have access to readily available tools that move past basic education and engage all students on campus with concrete environmental justice organizing and action, allowing for collaboration that leads to impactful projects. We will provide this access through a free social app, recurring guides available for purchase, and a website,...

Summer Agroecology and Sustainability

Project Description

This project seeks to maintain the functionality of Berkeley Student Farms during the upcoming summer, when we expect volunteer numbers to decrease and gardens to be left unattended; last summer we averaged 3 volunteers per workday compared to 62 in the fall. Through the support of TGIF, BSF aims to hire 5 summer Garden Managers who will continue the essential farm work needed to maintain critical garden operations: growing organic produce, leading student volunteers, coordinating food donations, and maintaining our compost systems, as well as renovating our...

Putting the "Campus" in Campus Grocery: The Food Collective as a Full-Service Grocery in the Student Union

Project Description

The Collective serves over ten thousand student patrons each year with affordable, healthy, sustainable and local foods from minority vendors and farmers — including over 150 weekly student member-volunteers each semester — out of a small space never intended for food service with a highly-limited but functional grocery selection. We're returning to the Green Initiative Fund — the single most significant funder in building the Collective's skill sets and capacity over the past 12 years — to support us in fulfilling the longtime student vision for a dedicated...

Food Relatives Conference by the Food Institute Graduate Council

Project Description

By bridging academics, community leaders, consumers, and other vital actors within our food system, FIGC seeks to reinforce the goal of the Berkeley Food Institute (BFI): to understand and transform food systems in a cross-disciplinary manner in order to build a more resilient and equitable future within and beyond academic institutions. In 2022, FIGC ran a free-to the-public hybrid 2022 Conference, “Food Relatives: Decolonizing and Indigenizing the Global Food System” to connect scholars, community members, artists, and policy makers through varying...

Biofuel Technologies Club: Algae Solar Panel Project

Project Description

The Biofuels Technology Club (BTC) is a College of Chemistry club, whose committed mission is to achieve a zero-waste campus. By making biodiesel from waste cooking oil in the campus dining halls, the club has the goal of eventually powering campus fleets. Though CalDining continues to provide an excellent source of oil for feedstock, we have launched an experimental team to look into other potential sources if increased scale is needed. One key area of exploration is microalgae; as it produces lipid content, accumulates in biomass rapidly, and requires low-...

Kingman Hall Creek Restoration

Kingman Hall and the Berkeley Student Cooperatives are seeking funding to restore the riparian cooridor within their house footprint. The upper portion of Strawberry Creek flows through Kingman Hall and there is a current creek bed failure that needs to be addressed. Funding would be used to hire two student leads, cover supplies of new plants and equipment, and the removal of trees to open up the canopy.

Hispanic Engineers and Scientists Educational and Technological Rooftop Garden

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.

High-Output Parallel Biodiesel Processing System (HOPBPS)

The Biofuels Technology Club (BTC) at UC Berkeley's College of Chemistry has a clear mission: to achieve a zero-waste campus by producing biodiesel from campus dining hall waste cooking oil. Since its founding in 2015, the club has successfully produced over 500 gallons of high-quality biodiesel, which has been tested extensively in the lab and for 12,000 miles in a car. The club's ultimate goal is to power the UC Berkeley campus fleets, closing an important loop within the school's consumption and waste streams. However, the club's current processing setup has limited capacity, preventing it from producing the significant quantities of biodiesel needed to achieve its goal.