Environment170′s Weblog

Leanna Rodriguez

This past Wednesday, May 27, the Action Research Team at UCLA held group presentations about eco-friendly experiments and suggestions for improving human activities and the environment. Unfortunately I could not stay the entire two hours so I only saw four of the eight presentations. The four groups whose presentations I was able to see each conducted their own studies here at UCLA in order to estimate exactly how much energy, water, and garbage is wasted and/or not properly taken care of on this campus, and to see how many students here are actually interested in doing something to address this issue.

The theme I saw in each presentation was that most people around the world who are so wasteful, are this way unknowingly. Therefore, I realized that as a student attending these presentations, my role was to learn these facts, understand what I can do to help the environment, and spread the word around in order to educate others of the facts.

The first presenters who went up called themselves Team Turf, as their goal was to figure out the pros and cons of replacing the natural grass in the IM Field here at UCLA with artificial grass. One major pro they discovered was that the cost of maintaining natural grass was approximately $8-9 million while the cost of maintaining artificial grass was about half that at $3-4 million. Therefore, not only is the turf less expensive to maintain, it would also cut down on water usage. Natural grass requires 6.4 million gallons of water per year while turf only requires under a million gallons a year. As good as these pros sound, there are a few cons that have held this school back from this option. One con is that, with the weather we are used to in Southern California, turf would require a heating system during the winter and a cooling system during the summer to keep it at a steady temperature. The downside of this fact is indeed that this heating/cooling system would use energy and we are trying to help the environment not hurt it further. Also, UCLA, especially the IM field, is host to a myriad of events each year, and so many events cause little harm to natural grass, but are very damaging to artificial grass. One possible solution Team Turf concluded was that the field remain half natural and the other half be replaced with artificial.

The next three teams, through their research, found that UCLA students are very much interested in helping the environment and do not need to be bribed to do so. The team who conducted the “Zero-Waste Floor” Experiment and the group who called themselves the “Waste Division and Diversion” both conducted almost entirely the same experiment, with the small difference in where the experiment was conducted. The first of the two studied where students who live in the dorms throw what kind of trash away, while the other group did the same on campus, mainly in Ackerman. Both groups went about their studies by routinely grabbing a bag of trash from a certain spot and weighing it, then sorting through the trash, and weighing it again. What they found was that after sorting and separating recyclables, composts, and actual trash that can go nowhere else but a landfill, much less trash is thrown into landfills than if not sorted out.

The last of the presentation that i saw was by the Energy Group. Their objective was to look at targets in which they can conserve energy by using two methods: 1)monitoring where energy is being wasted, and 2) surveying UCLA students to see who was willing to help. Some steps being taken at UCLA include possibly installing motion sensitive lights in the restrooms in the dorms, otherwise they may stay on all night though no one is using them.

In conclusion, with the wonderful research these great people have done, we have so many options available so that we can already take action in saving the environment, or at least slowing down its depletion. The next step that needs to be taken is educating others and encouraging the community to take action.