Planting trees, encouraging bike commuting and minimizing energy lost to heating and cooling are among the ways Oregon State University employees and students plan to reduce the university’s carbon footprint, thanks to grants from the Carbon Reduction Pilot Program administered by the Faculty Senate Carbon Commitment Committee.
In October, C3 and OSU’s Sustainability Office put out a request for proposals from university employees and students who had ideas for practical, measurable ways to reduce OSU’s carbon footprint. In January, the nine successful awardees — including five student-led projects — were granted a total of $50,000, and those projects are now getting underway.
C3 members were “cautiously optimistic” they would receive enough quality proposals to disburse the full amount, but the applications they received went above and beyond, said Dave Dickson, a member of the committee and a senior licensing manager and VP for research in the Division of Research and Innovation.
“We were thrilled to receive 22 proposals, including several for projects that are led by students, so we were able to achieve our goal of having a competitive award process to allocate all of the funding,” he said. “Our hope is that the projects will be successful enough to justify continued funding for the program in the coming years.”
The $50,000 budget for the carbon reduction pilot program comes from Facilities Planning and Management as part of a 2024 resolution passed by the OSU Faculty Senate to finance grassroots projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions across university operations and activities.
The nine awardees received grants ranging from $988 to $10,472, with a little more than $27,000 going to student-led projects.
Grant projects and amounts:
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$10,472 to identify liquid nitrogen leaks at the Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Institute on the HP campus and develop mitigation strategies, led by Ruth Milston-Clements, ATAMI staff.
- $7,840 for “Cycle Away from Carbon,” a project to increase bike commuting around campus, led by environmental science student Sebastian Partida-Osuna with principal advisor and transportation Services director Mark Zandonella.
- $6,712 for Corvallis campus tree-planting carbon sequestration led by Landscape Manager Todd Cross in partnership with student workers.
- $6,200 to assess the feasibility of on-site hydrothermal carbonization of biosolids for waste valorization. This would aim to reduce OSU’s reliance on third-party vendors for disposal of biomass waste by recycling biosolids into a carbon-based hydrochar that can be used as a fertilizer or biofuel. Doing this on-site would also reduce OSU’s contribution to the third-party vendors’ carbon emissions. This assessment project is led by chemical engineering student Vy Pham with faculty advisor Nick AuYeung, associate professor of chemical, biological and environmental engineering.
- $6,000 for “smart labs” that will optimize the timing of certain operations to best use renewable energy sources, led by chemical engineering student Justin Carkner with AuYeung as faculty advisor.
- $4,200 to reduce energy use through LED lighting upgrades, led by Facilities Services electrical and alarm manager Brandon Holden.
- $4,000 to assess the feasibility of harvesting “waste” heat, such as billowing steam or autoclave discharge, as well as excess heat from areas of poor ventilation on the Corvallis campus, led by chemical engineering student Alex Ree with AuYeung as faculty advisor.
- $3,588 to apply solar film to windows in air-conditioned spaces in Batcheller and Covell halls to reduce solar gain, with student lead Laura Osborne in chemical engineering and faculty leads Karl Happala, director of the OSU Energy Efficiency Center, and Max Novack, an Energy Efficiency Center research assistant.
- $988 to replace a specimen refrigerator with a more efficient model in the Seabird Oceanography Lab, with faculty lead Rachael Orben, a researcher at the Marine Mammal Institute.
The committee hopes to see a measurable impact on OSU’s carbon emissions as well as increased campus awareness of the innovative work of these students and employees and the institutional support available for projects like these, Dickson said.
“The committee knows budget conditions are tight right now, so our hope is that the program will be renewed at least at the same funding level,” he said. “It would be a huge success if it’s renewed with additional funding.”
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