updated Wednesday, June 12, 2013 – 6:21pm
View this editorial in the Athens Banner-Herald

Brad Mannion (See this article in the Red & Black)

Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia Costa Rica recently was honored by GoAbroad.com with the 2013 Innovation in Sustainability Award at the NAFSA: Association of International Educators annual conference in St. Louis.

The award recognizes institutions, organizations and individuals who are creating initiatives to move the field of international education forward and to commend leaders in the community for their efforts to go beyond the conventional.

NAFSA is an association of individuals worldwide advancing international education and exchange and global workforce development.

“This is a great honor and was made possible by a dedicated team of people at the University of Georgia’s main campus in Athens and at the campus in Costa Rica,” said Quint Newcomer, director of the UGA Costa Rica program. “Our goal from day one was to make the Costa Rica campus a model of sustainability and environmental stewardship, and the Innovation in Sustainability Award validates that our efforts are bearing fruit.

“With dedicated faculty, students and staff in Costa Rica and unwavering support from the university, our ability to exceed sustainability benchmarks is superb. I believe this award represents the culmination of a collaborative effort that makes UGA Costa Rica one of the world’s best travel-study destinations.”

GoAbroad.com recognized UGA Costa Rica for studying, understanding and embodying the interconnectedness of human society within the natural environment. The 155-acre campus in Monteverde is independently certified as a sustainable operation achieving a score of 85 percent or higher in all four areas evaluated, including 100 percent in the assessment of employee relations and community engagement.

Examples of UGA Costa Rica’s sustainability practices include:

·         An integrated sustainable farm serves as a living classroom, producing 15 percent of food served on campus. Additionally, all food products come from within 200 miles of campus, with 25-30 percent coming directly from small farmers in the immediate community.

·         Local farmers offer sustainable agriculture tours and share traditional knowledge with students. UGA Costa Rica landscape architecture students in service-learning courses provide trail designs, maps, logos and websites to enhance the quality of tours. These tours annually inject $15,000 into the local economy.

·         Homestays, dancing and cooking lessons for students that support the local economy and stimulate cross-cultural understanding.

·         UGA Costa Rica operates a carbon-offset program in which native trees, planted and monitored by students, capture carbon while simultaneously restoring habitat for migratory birds and stabilizing soils on degraded hillsides. More than 28,000 trees had been planted as of December 2012, with 10,000 trees a year planned for 2013-2015.

·         Model anaerobic digestion wastewater treatment systems for human and animal waste generate biogas used for cooking meals in the campus’s dining hall, turning waste into food.

·         Sustainability in Action, a semester education abroad program, offers interdisciplinary field experiences and is closely aligned with the UGA Office of Sustainability’s forthcoming Sustainability Certificate program. Courses include sociology, ethics, conservation ecology, organic agriculture and climate change.

For more information on UGA Costa Rica, see http://www.externalaffairs.uga.edu/costa_rica/index.php.

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Note to editors: An image of UGA Costa Rica is available at http://multimedia.uga.edu/media/images/UGA-Costa-Rica-Campus-2013.jpg.

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See additional articles in the Athens Banner Herald, Red & Black and UGA External Affairs.

Athens, Ga. – The Eugene Odum Environmental Grants Program, which is administered by the University of Georgia Office of Sustainability, awarded funding to 10 schools in the Athens area to implement environmental education projects over the upcoming school year.

The grants program, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, promotes opportunities for young people to learn about ecological issues and develop a vision for solving environmental problems through hands-on activities.

Schools receiving funding are listed below by school name, teacher who submitted the proposals and name of the project.

• Whit Davis Elementary School, Susie Criswell: “Encouraging Young Artists to Promote Environmental Stewardship”
• J.J. Harris Elementary Charter School, Jenna Starnes: “Greenhouse Launch”
• Hilsman Middle School, Audrey Hughes: “Trash Hunger”
• Clarke Middle School, Nathalie Guerin: “‘Owls’ Eat Worms for Lunch”
• Hilsman Middle School, Audrey Hughes: “Go Green, Save Green!”
• Hilsman Middle School, Audrey Hughes: “Energy Conservation Day”
• Hilsman Middle School, Diarra Mosley: “Happy Environment, Happy Learning!”
• Cedar Shoals High School, Stella Guerrero: “Rain Garden Restoration and Improvement”
• Athens Montessori School, Tita Gatrell: “Solar Wild Flower Pollinator Garden”
• Hilsman Middle School, Audrey Hughes: “Water Conservation with Rain Barrels”

The schools and teachers were recognized at the annual GreenFest Awards Ceremony held at Flinchum’s Phoenix recently. Among those present was Hughes, a middle school science teacher who was instrumental in obtaining five grants for the school. Hughes also is the grand prize recipient of the 2013 Georgia United Credit Union and Star 94 Radio’s Top Five “Teachers Make a Difference” Award for environmental programming in her classroom.

This year, the Odum grants program received a record number of applications, and two sponsors were added, making it possible to fund more projects. The 2013 sponsors are Athens Audubon Society, Kiwanis Club of Athens, ReCommunity Recycling, Koons Environmental Design, Georgia Power, Nutter & Associates Inc., the UGA Odum School of Ecology, Keep Athens-Clarke County Beautiful, Oconee Rivers Greenway Commission and the Athens Optimist Club, which, as a club, also judged all proposals received.

Previously overseen by Odum School staff Larry Dendy and Tammy Andros, the UGA Office of Sustainability now manages the grants program.

“It’s a privilege to house this program in our office and to be a liaison for the discovery of environmental education in local classrooms,” said Jennifer Dunlop, a program coordinator in the Office of Sustainability.

For more information on Eugene Odum Environmental Grants Program and other initiatives of the Office of Sustainability, see www.sustainability.uga.edu.

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 Note to editors: The grants program logo is available at http://multimedia.uga.edu/media/images/odum-grants-logo.jpg. An image of Hughes taking a photo of her students at the awards presentation is available at http://multimedia.uga.edu/media/images/Audrey-Hughes-Greenfest-2013.jpg.

Humanity is at the beginning of its third major cultural and economic revolution, a University of Georgia scientist told bioenergy researchers at UGA.

First there was the agricultural revolution about 12,000 years ago, when humanity switched from hunting and gathering to cultivating crops and domesticating animals.

Then came the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, when humans moved away from manufacturing things by hand to machines, harnessing water power and new fuels such as coal to run those machines.

Now, the sustainability revolution has begun, bringing dramatic changes in fuel supplies and carbon management, said Michael W. Adams, a UGA professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.

Adams was a featured speaker Monday at this year’s annual retreat of UGA’s Bioenergy Systems Research Institute, a large multidisciplinary group of scientists exploring how to create fuels, energy and other products from biomass such as fast-growing grasses, wood and algae.

The retreat brings UGA researchers together with outside experts to talk about the status of their research and where it’s headed.

Adams does research on extremophiles — bacteria and other creatures that live in very hot or other extreme environments. Scientists hope such creatures may one day help as they look for cost-efficient ways to convert biomass into bioenergy that can fuel machines.

A century from now, machines may be powered by fuels produced by solar-powered chemical processes inspired by biological processes, Adams said.

But in the shorter term, scientists are focusing on such methods as converting wood or grass into fuels, relying on biological processes for part of the work.

This year’s retreat focused on sustainability, beginning with simply figuring out how to define and measure sustainability, said Ryan Adolphson, director of public service and outreach in UGA’s College of Engineering and associate director of the Bioenergy Systems Research Institute, or BSRI.

Like school performance, sustainability is not easy to measure, said UGA economist Gregory Colson, another speaker at the conference. In evaluating school performance, results like students’ contributions to society are hard to measure. Instead, policymakers focus on something easily measured — test scores. Similarly, economists focus on easy metrics such as price when evaluating something like the sustainability of a fuel source, ignoring some less easily measurable costs such as the health consequences of pollution or the environmental damage it may cause, he said.

Policymakers can use strategies such as carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs to make the price of fuel a closer reflection of its true costs, according to Colson.

Consumers, who don’t always make strictly rational choices, tend to respond more strongly to a message that says they’re losing $5 per month by not switching from one thing to another, such as a fuel, than a message that says they could gain $5 per month by switching, he said.

“People focus much more on losses than gains,” he said.

People are also more likely to take steps to conserve energy if they know their neighbors are conserving, he said.

But biofuels will become increasingly competitive, Colson predicted.

“As the prices of fossil fuels increase, biofuels will expand,” Colson said.

The idea of getting energy from trees and other kinds of biomass has great promise, said another speaker, F.G. Courtney-Beauregard of the National Wildlife Federation.

“The challenge is to do it right,” said Courtney-Beauregard, the federation’s Southeast sustainable bioenergy manager.

The characteristics of some plants seen as good candidates for fuel crops because of their rapid growth and drought tolerance, can be the same characteristics that make a plant likely to be highly invasive, disrupting natural communities, she said.

And depending on how it’s done, burning woody biomass could actually put more carbon into the atmosphere than it prevents, she said.

But some small-scale existing plants in the Southeast are promising, burning waste material and only transporting it a short distance, she said.

• Follow education reporter Lee Shearer at www.facebook.com/LeeShearerABHor https://twitter.com/LeeShearer.

Athens, Ga. – The sun provides the most abundant source of energy on the planet. However, only a tiny fraction of the solar radiation on Earth is converted into useful energy.

To help solve this problem, researchers at the University of Georgia looked to nature for inspiration, and they are now developing a new technology that makes it possible to use plants to generate electricity.

“Clean energy is the need of the century,” said Ramaraja Ramasamy, assistant professor in the UGA College of Engineering and the corresponding author of a paper describing the process in the Journal of Energy and Environmental Science. “This approach may one day transform our ability to generate cleaner power from sunlight using plant-based systems.”

Plants are the undisputed champions of solar power. After billions of years of evolution, most of them operate at nearly 100 percent quantum efficiency, meaning that for every photon of sunlight a plant captures, it produces an equal number of electrons. Converting even a fraction of this into electricity would improve upon the efficiency seen with solar panels, which generally operate at efficiency levels between 12 and 17 percent.

During photosynthesis, plants use sunlight to split water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen, which produces electrons. These newly freed electrons go on to help create sugars that plants use much like food to support growth and reproduction.

“We have developed a way to interrupt photosynthesis so that we can capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make these sugars,” said Ramasamy, who is also a member of UGA’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.

Ramasamy’s technology involves separating out structures in the plant cell called thylakoids, which are responsible for capturing and storing energy from sunlight. Researchers manipulate the proteins contained in the thylakoids, interrupting the pathway along which electrons flow.

These modified thylakoids are then immobilized on a specially designed backing of carbon nanotubes, cylindrical structures that are nearly 50,000 times finer than a human hair. The nanotubes act as an electrical conductor, capturing the electrons from the plant material and sending them along a wire.

In small-scale experiments, this approach resulted in electrical current levels that are two orders of magnitude larger than those previously reported in similar systems.

Ramasamy cautions that much more work must be done before this technology reaches commercialization, but he and his collaborators are already working to improve the stability and output of their device.

“In the near term, this technology might best be used for remote sensors or other portable electronic equipment that requires less power to run,” he said. “If we are able to leverage technologies like genetic engineering to enhance stability of the plant photosynthetic machineries, I’m very hopeful that this technology will be competitive to traditional solar panels in the future.”

“We have discovered something very promising here, and it is certainly worth exploring further,” he said. “The electrical output we see now is modest, but only about 30 years ago, hydrogen fuel cells were in their infancy, and now they can power cars, buses and even buildings.”

The full study, which was co-authored by UGA graduate student Jessica Calkins and postdoctoral research associate Yogeswaran Umasankar, is available at http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2013/ee/c3ee40634b.

For more about research in Ramasamy’s lab, see www.ramasamy.uga.edu

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Note to editors: An image of Ramasamy in his lab is available at http://multimedia.uga.edu/media/images/Ramasamy-Ramaraja.jpg. An image of Ramasamy working with Yogeswaran Umasankar is available at http://multimedia.uga.edu/media/images/Ramasamy-working-with-Yogeswaran-Umasankar.jpg.

By Lee Shearer updated Friday, April 26, 2013 – 10:36pm

http://onlineathens.com/uga/2013-04-26/volunteers-haul-out-tires-dolls-more-athens-river-clean

By Nick Coltrain published Saturday, April 27, 2013

http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2013-04-27/panel-sustainability-leaders-touts-shifts-practices

http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2013-04-23/electronics-recycled-uga-event

A long line of cars queued up at the University of Georgia Intramural Fields on Tuesday to shed electronic waste for recycling.

Items brought included computers and monitors, floppy discs by the hundreds, batteries by the thousands, vacuum cleaners, printers, boom boxes, Christmas lights, televisions, microwave ovens, cell phones, a well pump, broken coffee makers and cords of all descriptions. Others turned over their CD collections, including some of the greatest musicians of the 20th century — Ray Charles, The Doors and Van Morrison.

In short, a kind of electronic archaeology of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

“You name it, we get it,” said Ken Parris of Athens’ KP Surplus, an electronics recycling company helping with the effort.

Some also brought styrofoam, but had to keep it. Unlike last year, styrofoam wasn’t accepted at UGA’s second annual “Recycling Happy Hour,” one of a number of environmentally themed events the university is staging this week.

People can bring old electronic devices to the Athens-Clarke County Landfill or the government’s recycling facility anytime during working hours, said Athens-Clarke County recycling administrator Suki Janssen.

But twice a year, people can recycle stuff after normal business hours in these so-called happy hours, she said, once in the fall and once in the spring at UGA.

“Last year we had 175 vehicles from seven counties, plus three bicycles, which was cool,” said UGA sustainability coordinator Kevin Kirsche. Among other things, they brought 1,678 pounds of recyclable electronics, fluorescent light tubes, and 79 televisions.

This year looked like more, said Parris, who feared they would run out of cardboard bins to hold it all.

Abbie Thaxton of radio station WUGA had already counted nearly 100 cars by 6 p.m., halfway through, at least officially.

Some recyclers began showing up at 4 p.m., an hour before the official start, Kirsche said.

Not all will be torn apart for materials. Some computers will be turned over to Free I.T. Athens, a volunteer group that refurbishes computers and then makes them available at low cost to low-income people, Kirsche said.

UGA also staged a campus waste audit Tuesday, dumping out a somewhat smelly wad of garbage collected from about 400 outdoor waste receptacles on the UGA campus. On a lawn beside UGA’s busy Tate Student Center, volunteers and workers in UGA’s sustainability office sorted the mess into recyclable items and stuff that had to go to the landfill.

The purpose was partly educational, to show how much many throw away that could have been recycled. But it will also show just what people put in outdoor trash receptacles as the university plans an outdoor waste system that will make it easier for people to recycle, Kirsche said.

Working with other groups, the UGA sustainability office has scheduled events throughout the week to promote waste reduction and other sustainability measures.

BikeAthens, an alternative transportation advocacy group, will hold a bicycle safety training from 11 a.m. until noon today on the Myers Hall quad, for example.

On Thursday at 3:30 p.m. in the Dean Rusk Center, panelists from several area businesses and industries will talk about how they’ve made their businesses more sustainable, often saving money in the process.

And at 2 p.m. Friday, volunteers will take to the water, heading out in canoes and kayaks for a Middle Oconee River clean-up from Big Dogs on the River at 2525 Atlanta Highway.

More information about these and other events can be viewed athttp://sustainability.uga.edu/earthweek. For more information on events and activities during the Athens-Clarke County Green Fest, seehttp://athensgreenfest.com/About_GreenFest.php.

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