“Pomp and Circumstance” accompanies the annual spring rites of commencement, as thousands of bright-eyed college graduates depart for the real world. Another, less memorable (and certainly more environmentally-damaging) tradition usually follows immediately after: the dumping of four years’ worth of Ikea futons, mini-fridges, Greek life t-shirts and dog-eared textbooks — items that’ll be purchased by the cartload by incoming freshman next fall.
Undergraduate move-out day generates tons of waste. Student activists on these three college campuses created more efficient systems to reuse and recycle.
University of New Hampshire
The first student-run sustainability initiative of its kind in the country, Trash2Treasure at this college in Durham, N.H., makes storage easier for on-campus students who have limited options for where to stash their furniture over the summer; in the process, they diverted 110 tons from dumpsters. Unwanted items are picked up at the end of each academic year, then sold to newcomers in the fall. It’s profitable enough as a business model that it actually generates more money than it spends to operate — earning $55,000 in revenue for future initiatives, as well as saving the school $10,000 in cleanup costs and parents more than $200,000 on dorm furnishings.
“Thousands of reusable items clog up streets and sidewalks and are sent to landfills every year,” Alex Freid, a UNH student who co-created T2T, tells The Boston Globe. “This is a problem campuses, towns, and cities have been seeing for 20 or 30 years, so they love to see students taking initiative and solving the problem.” Freid now runs the Post-Landfill Action Network, a nonprofit bringing the methods they refined at UNH to other campuses like University of Massachusetts, Tulane University in New Orleans, Northeastern and the College of William and Mary. “Our goal is to help campuses achieve zero waste, and move-out waste is a really great way to start,” Freid adds. “What we’re trying to do is to build universities as microcosms of how the world can and should function in the future.”
Yale University
A decade ago, this Ivy League school in New Haven, Conn., began the annual “Spring Salvage.” The program is based on a simple concept: “All students have to do is look for the blue and gray donation bins as they move out,” says Gabriel Roy-Liguori, a rising senior who helps coordinate the collection. “Blue bins are for soft items” — clothes, shoes, towels, sheets — “gray ones are for hard items” — books, lamps, electronics. There’s some mild confusion every year with a handful of students who think the 150 collection bins are meant for trash, but for the most part, the initiative salvages plenty of perfectly good items. Last year, more than 60,000 pounds of items were donated to Goodwill Industries. Overall, waste declined from 101 tons in 2013 to 93 tons last year, and a greater percentage went to charity instead of the landfill.
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Arizona State University
At the largest campus in the country, students on five campuses around Phoenix diverted 156,860 pounds of waste by redirecting it to charity, repurposing it for next year’s students or recycling it. The “Ditch the Dumpster” campaign works similar to other salvage programs, but at a huge scale. “When 9,000 students leave campus in the course of a week, you have to be on top of your game,” says Elizabeth Kather, a former member of the Sun Devils’ program. “You need a dedicated team — one that can be nimble as things change and react quickly to the needs of the program.” With this year’s move-out program, which launched on Earth Day, they’re hoping to exceed last year’s total, breaking past 78 tons.
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Tag: Arizona State University
Do Ants Hold the Key to Reducing Pollution?
Ants — some bite, some eat wood and others just come crawling when there’s food left out on the counter. Turns out, however, that these insects (that most of us find downright annoying) could be helpful in reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
How so?
A recent study from Arizona State University, conducted by geology professor Ronald Dorn, found that the presence of ants can cause certain rocks to capture carbon dioxide, therefore preventing it from going into the atmosphere. This CO2 absorption isn’t small either. Ants can increase the natural amount a rock takes in by up to 335 times.
What’s the secret to this powerful partnership? Well, even Dorn doesn’t quite seem to know yet. In fact, he basically discovered the connection by accident. Back in the early 1990s, he was conducting a study about the weathering of minerals, and one of the rocks he was studying happened to become ant-infested. The bugs were annoying to him, pouring out whenever he tried to drill for a sample. Over time, however, he realized their effect on capturing carbon dioxide.
Even without the help of insects, though, rocks absorb a lot of carbon from the air.
The dangerous polluter seeps into calcium and magnesium deposits found in many rocks, which then transforms into limestone or dolomite. If it weren’t for rocks taking in carbon, our earth would be a whole lot warmer and air dirtier than it already is.
“When I take students on field trips, I make them kiss the limestone, because that limestone is just CO2 that’s just locked up in rocks and how Earth has remained habitable,” Dorn told Scientific American.
With carbon-rich rock already having contributed so much to our environment, the effect of ants speeding up the process could be huge. After all, there’s an estimated 10 trillion of the tiny insects on earth at our disposal. Even better would be if researchers could figure out exactly what the ants do to the rock to make it absorb carbon faster. Then, the solution could be mass-produced.
Until that’s the case, we’ll just have to settle for welcoming ants into our yards and enjoying our little patch of cleaner air.
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Here’s How Starbucks is Fixing the American Education System
This news will probably justify the expense of your next Frappuccino.
In a surprising announcement, Starbucks is giving an amazing new perk to its workers across the country: A free college education.
The New York Times reports that the coffee powerhouse will pay tuition for any of its 135,000 employees to attend online college classes at Arizona State University as part of the Starbucks College Achievement Plan.
Incredibly, workers don’t even have to remain with Starbucks after receiving their degree — encouraging them to leave coffee-making for better jobs. Starbucks president and CEO Howard D. Schultz told the newspaper that he wants employee success to be “accreted to our brand, our reputation and our business,” and adds, “I believe it will lower attrition, it’ll increase performance, it’ll attract and retain better people.”
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To qualify, an employee must work at least 20 hours a week at Starbucks and have the test scores necessary for admission into ASU. Employees who’ve already completed two years of college credits will have their tuition fully paid for. For those with less than two years of college, the company will pay partial tuition costs.
The company is also providing a dedicated enrollment coach, financial aid counselor, and academic advisor.
The fact is, the American education system is flawed; our $1.2 trillion student loan crisis proves it. These days, you need a college degree in order to land a competitive, well-paid job — but too many people have to go into a mountain of debt to obtain a degree. As Schultz says in the video below, “the last few years in America, we have certainly seen a fracturing of what I’d loosely describe as the American dream or the American promise.”
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He continues, “there’s no doubt the inequality within the country has created a situation where many, many Americans are being left behind. And the question I think for all of us is, ‘Should we accept that, or should we try to do something about it?'”
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According to the Times report, “70 percent of Starbucks workers do not have a degree but want to earn one; some have never gone to college, some have gone but dropped out, and others are in school, but have found it slow going.”
While employer-paid college tuition isn’t something new, it’s not very common. And programs like this are unheard of. Most companies want their workers to study subjects that will suit the company’s needs, while Starbucks allows employees to choose from 40 of ASU’s educational programs, from retail management to electrical engineering. (It’s also worth mentioning that the very successful global coffee company also offers health care for all employees — full- and part-time — and gives stock options, too).
As we previously reported, Shultz is the quintessential social innovator and philanthropist. This past March, he donated an extraordinary $30 million to help with the rehabilitation of our returning soldiers, putting the money towards research into brain trauma and PTSD — ailments that thousands of warriors suffer from.
Let’s go ahead and say it: Best boss ever.
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Will Bringing Big Data Into the Classroom Help Students Learn Better?
Brad McIlquham was tutoring at-risk youth in Durham, N.C., when a former co-worker gave him the educator’s equivalent of the Social Network pitch. What if, instead of teaching at most 50 kids a year, you could help bring personalized tutoring to 100,000, or a million kids?
McIlquham’s co-worker, Jose Ferreira — who had taught SAT and GMAT prep with McIlquham at Kaplan — was proposing an upending of the traditional “teach to the middle” classroom model. When teachers instruct students of varying ability in the same class, some students get bored, while others struggle. And often, teachers don’t discover which students have failed to understand key concepts until their tests get graded. But by then, they’ve already fallen behind. In the meantime, all the potentially useful data from students’ individual homework assignments, quizzes and textbook exercises — everything but the final grade — disappear into the ether.
Ferreira came up with an idea to capture that data and use it to create digital education tools that help tailor the curriculum to each student as he or she learns — by detecting gaps in knowledge early on, recommending the appropriate exercises to help students acquire skill and alerting teachers when students are struggling. “Our goal is to personalize education,” says McIlquham, now director of academics of the education startup called Knewton that Ferreira founded, “to take educational content and understand not only the ins and outs of that content, but how students interact with it — when students run into difficulties, when they start to forget things — and use it to customize the educational experience.”
Knewton, which launched in 2008, bills itself as an adaptive learning “platform,” a behind-the-scenes service that schools can use to personalize their existing digital coursework. Assisted by Knewton, schools can monitor students’ progress as they work through lessons and make sure students are grasping the material before moving on. In its early years, Knewton was designing its own digital coursework. But since 2011, it has partnered with the textbook publishing company Pearson, combining its analytics tools with that company’s educational material; and last summer Knewton announced a similar partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishing company. So far, Knewton’s also received $105 million in funding from Pearson and a collection of venture capital firms.
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Knewton didn’t invent adaptive learning: There are a lot of digital education tools that tailor coursework to individual students, giving them more difficult problems as they get better at solving them, for example. The technology has become increasingly popular with the growth of the “flipped classroom,” a way of organizing courses so that students watch video lectures and do reading at home, then do coursework and exercises in class, where teachers are there to help them.
Knewton brings advanced data analysis to this model, looking at factors like how much time students spend on specific questions and whether they consistently fall for certain false answers. “This shows a misconception, that they’re thinking about a concept in the wrong way,” McIlquham says. It’s something that might be easy to fix, but would be difficult to detect from looking at the results of a single test.
McIlquham emphasizes that this kind of adaptive process is a boon to teachers as well as to students, giving them new insight into what lessons are working, what concepts need to be revisited and which students are falling behind. “Teachers will be so much better equipped when they walk into the classroom,” he says.
As Knewton gathers more and more data, McIlquham says, it will also be able to figure out patterns in learning, drawing connections between certain types of students and what learning methods work best for them — a sort of Netflix-style “people who did well with this exercise also did well with this” recommendation engine. “If you’re a similar student and you struggled with something I struggled with, we can see that if I learned it the same way, data suggests you’ll learn well that way too,” explains McIlquham.
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Knewton will have a lot of data to work with. Through its partnerships with Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it is now “powering” interactive education programs for 3 million students, and will reach up to 10 million by the end of 2014, from kindergarten all the way through college.
Mcllquham envisions an educational system where grade levels and semesters fall away, and students progress at their own pace, learning key concepts in small groups with help from a teacher. One of Knewton’s earliest test programs involved remedial math students at Arizona State University, which contracted with Knewton in 2011 to design an adaptive math program. ASU had a dropout problem. Some of its remedial students had been away from school for 10 years and needed a quick refresher, while others had never received basic math education in the first place. When these students were dumped into the same classroom, few received the right kind of instruction and many dropped out.
Knewton’s program let more advanced students skip concepts they already understood and focus on ones they didn’t, while an instructor went from student to student giving individual help. Initial figures from Knewton’s adaptive program at ASU showed that withdrawal rates dropped by half after two semesters and the proportion of students getting passing grades rose from 64 percent to 75 percent. Almost half the students finished their classes four weeks early. McIlquham says this sort of variable pacing and small-group instruction could become the norm.
Some observers have pointed out that while go-at-your-own-pace learning works well for some students, it can allow less motivated students to fall far behind. There are also questions about whether adaptive learning can extend beyond basic introductory classes, and whether it would work with less quantifiable, more intuitive subject matter, like literature and philosophy.
McIlquham thinks that adaptive education will free up teachers in any setting for more one-on-one instruction with students, and help them figure out which students need special attention. “Teachers are going to have so much more relevant information about their classes available to them,” says McIlquham. “As a teacher myself I’m excited about that. I’m much happier working with students on problem solving, critical thinking and issues they’re having, than standing up in front of a class and lecturing as if they’re all the same student.”
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