Previous Green Fund Recipients

Find out how previous Green Fund awardees have used their funding to reduce waste and advance environmentally-friend practices on campus.

2023-2024

Phoenix Farms Vermiculture

In Winter 2024, the RSO Phoenix Farms received funding to install a vermiculture composting pod in its community garden located on 56th Street. Vermiculture uses worms to break down organic material and convert it to nutrient – rich soil, thereby efficiently reducing food waste, promoting easy and sustainable gardening practices, and improving soil health. The vermiculture subpod is an in-ground worm-based composting bin that with Green Fund funding, has been implemented directly in the Phoenix Farms garden. We fill the subpod with bedding (leaf litter, cardboard, straw) to provide the worms with a warm, dark, moist environment to grow, and top with compostable food scraps. Food waste is reduced by adding compostable food scraps from members of the University and the club. The nutrient-rich vermicompost will also help grow fresh vegetables, which will be harvested and donated to the 55th Street Love Fridge, making our produce more accessible to those who need it most.

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Café Composting Expansion

Baristas at Ex Libris Café and Harper Café earned funding to sponsor coffee ground composting at both cafes for an entire calendar. This project departs from former cafe composting projects in being entirely café-led. Ex Libris Café and Harper Café collect coffee grounds that are transported by The Urban Canopy to be composted; the Green Fund funding goes to paying partners at Urban Canopy responsible for the physical composting of coffee grounds. Café staff collect coffee grounds in two 35-gallon bins and transport them to a pickup location every week. 15,000 pounds have been composted between February 2023 and April 2024. Composting imitates the natural recycling of nutrients in soils and turns organic waste into a commercially usable fertilizer product for farms. This process closes the food cycle loop and stops organic waste from ending up in landfills, producing methane gas which contributes to climate change. A significant amount of waste in cafés comes from coffee grounds.

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Uranyl Acetate Alternatives

In Winter 2024, the Uranyl Acetate Alternatives student group received funding from the Green Fund to reduce the usage of uranyl acetate in UChicago labs. Uranyl acetate (UA) serves as the standard contrast-enhancing agent in electron microscopy (EM) following processing with osmium. However, the use of UA poses risks to both researchers and the environment due to its toxicity and mild radioactivity. Surprisingly, several labs have demonstrated that oolong tea extract (OTE) serves as a suitable replacement for UA in en-block EM staining protocols. With our Green Fund funding, we examined how tea leaves prepared in a variety of ways stain tissue. Briefly, we replaced the final UA step in a standard en-bloc EM stain (Hua et. al.) with various preparations of different types of tea, and infused water with other natural compounds, like beets, turmeric, and almonds. To investigate what components of the tea play a role in staining for EM, we chose to use mass spectrometry for compound identification. To examine the actual components that are absorbed by the brain tissue, we perform mass spectrometry on both the initial staining solution and the staining solution after incubation. By analyzing EM quality in different groups, we have narrowed down which components of tea and other organic compounds that have similar staining quality as UA. With these results, we are working to develop a safer and more environmentally-friendly standard preparation that replaces UA without sacrificing staining quality.

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2022-2023

On Campus Clothing Bin and Collection System

In Fall 2022, PSI’s Campus Waste Reduction received funding from the Green Fund to install a permanent clothing donation bin in Reynolds Club, to provide the community with an easily accessible, not-for-profit donation spot. The bin, installed this week, will allow students to easily donate clothes to UChicago’s first thrift store: reSTORE. reSTORE works to create a more circular clothing economy in Hyde Park. We were open Spring Quarter 2023 Thursday, Friday, and Sunday 1-5PM in the basement of Stuart Hall. When shopping at our store, customers have the option of choosing one of three local environmental nonprofit organizations—Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Blacks in Green, and Openlands—to donate the profits of their purchase. reSTORE has already processed over 1,000 transactions and raised thousands of dollars for each of its local nonprofit partners, with the goal of becoming a permanent clothing waste solution on campus.

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On Campus Event Composting

PSI’s campus composting noticed that on-campus events with food hosted by RSOs and University departments are very popular and frequent, and there is a high volume of food and serving material waste generated from them. We designed a program to connect event organizers with The Urban Canopy, a local compost hauler, and provided subsidized compostable serving materials, compost receptacles, and volunteer assistance with waste sorting. We hoped to educate event organizers and attendees about sustainable waste practices. We reached out individually to event organizers about a month before each event, and worked with them to create a specific plan. There was always a PSI volunteer or Urban Canopy employee stationed next to the compost bins to eliminate contamination and educate attendees about composting.

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Food Recovery Network Bulk Foods Expansion

The UChicago Food Recovery Network is a CSRSO dedicated to fighting food waste on campus and food insecurity in Hyde Park and surrounding communities. Since 2018 we have partnered with a number of community organizations, including The Chicago City Life Center (CCLC), Margaret’s Village, St. Paul and the Redeemer Food Pantry, and the 55th St. Love Fridge as well as UC Dining to help distribute UChicago’s excess food waste. With Green Fund funding, we have begun to deliver not only single packaged foods but bulk foods to our local partners. Bulk foods are sorted into single-serve containers so that they can be more easily accepted by our community partners. We currently transport food 6 times a week to 3 community partners: the CCLC, St. Paul and the Redeemer Food Pantry, and the 55th St. Love Fridge.

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Composting at Student-Run Cafes

Phoenix Sustainability Initiative’s Campus Composting project group works to reduce solid waste produced by the University community through public education and by facilitating the use of organic waste diversion infrastructure on campus and around Hyde Park. This year, Campus Composting has implemented a program to compost waste at student-run cafes by piloting a program at Ex Libris Cafe. Using funds provided by the Green Fund, Campus Composting has installed two 35-gallon waste receptacles to collect coffee grounds. Since the start of the program, composing at Ex Libris has diverted ~300 lbs of coffee grounds from landfills weekly.

  • View symposium poster here