Small Projects (>$10K)

These projects received less than $10,000 from TGIF.

Mobilizing Sustainability at Berkeley - The Greening Operations (GO!) Team

Project Description

Fund a group of students to provide building audits and green event outreach on a case-by-case basis.

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Talking Louder About Sustainability, Next Generation

Project Description

The Office is requesting TGIF funds for communication internships both for our current team for next year and the next generation of specialists for next two academic years.

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Cal Greeks Energy Competition- Green Cup

Project Description

Use an energy competition as a way to implement small scale retrofits, reinforce sustainable behavior, and gain visibility for sustainable practices within the Greek system.

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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...

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...

UC Berkeley Green Labs Program Research Community Trainings

Project Description

Our goal through organizing this project is to be able to close a gap between the research community and zero waste efforts. By educating undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers using My Green Labs Accredited Professionals training modules, we hope to achieve sustainability within research and teaching lab spaces at the community level. Using the My Green Labs materials that have already been created by professionals and that are available on a digital platform will allow the Program Associate and Intern to focus on disseminating...

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-...

Electric Cargo Bike for ReUse Stations

ReUSE and Cal Zero Waste are requesting funds to purchase an electric cargo bicycle to transport materials from the Cal Zero Waste office to each ReUSE station, rather than moving items on foot.

Basins of Relations

Project Description

This project focuses on capturing roof rain water for the Convent house within the Berkeley
Student Cooperative (BSC). Each winter, 236,000 gallons of roof rainwater exits the property
entering the Berkeley Marina. This two-day workshop will redirect rainwater into rain gardens
and tanks to support 1) groundwater recharge 2) water tank storage during drought and 3) install
a perennial food gardens to mitigate local climate extremes by providing:
1. Microclimate: vegetative cover mitigating extreme heat,
2. Food Security: mediterranean perennial
...

Apparatus for Continual Crop Supervision and Intervention in Hydroponic Vertical Farms

Project Description

Modern agriculture is highly inefficient, with traditional growing methods wasting resources as compared to methods like hydroponics. While hydroponics significantly improves efficiency with yield and water usage, it can still be highly laborious. In the case of strawberries for example, many new roles emerge such as pollination, pruning, and continual supervision. This project aims to solve these restricting issues by integrating computer models to offload a significant chunk of work to robots -- thereby improving the proposition hydroponics can offer. VFB has...