CURRENT PROJECTS
Food & Water Security
Mycelial Solutions (formally Toadstool Composting)
Did you know that 50-70% recyclables delivered to our municipal Resource Recovery Facility at the Santa Cruz Dimeo Lane were actually solid waste contaminants, and therefore could not be recycled? This includes an estimated 56,000 lbs of waste from pizza boxes from the UCSC campus. Toadstool composting began as an innovative method to divert food-stained pizza boxes to nutrient rich compost, but has expanded to address bioremediation of more waste products using fungal enzymes, including polyurethane plastics.
ReplayPLA (Depolymerization and Reclamation)
ReplayPLA has joined forces with Mycelial Solutions to find non-toxic and low temperature catalysts to depolymerize bioplastics, specifically PLA, which is also a common contaminant in the UCSC recyclable waste stream. Once degraded, these plastics can be reformed into locally-sourced consumable materials such as 3D printing filament
Building on prior work, the DROPS project incorporates low impact development strategies to reduce onsite flooding, capture storm water runoff, and filter pollutants by working with students and community members. This year's team of interdisciplinary UCSC students is working with Pacific Elementary School in Davenport to see if rainwater harvesting could be designed to provide a non-potable water source for small farm irrigation while preventing flooding. They have completed their site assessment and are moving forward to design the system under the mentorship of a local civil engineer.
Transportation Technologies
UCSC Formula Slug and Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) is a diverse group of students that collaborates on the most hands-on engineering project at UC Santa Cruz. As a team of over 100 students, Formula Slug is made up of students from all majors and background who work together on many different projects. Currently, they are working to design and manufacture an ecologically-conscious, open wheeled, electrically powered vehicle to compete in the FSAE competition and show that 100% renewably powered vehicle can outperform traditional fossil fuels
Green Building
The LEED Lab at UCSC is participating in a new exciting collaboration this year with the City of Santa Cruz: the Net Positive Resilient All-Electric Affordable Housing at the METRO Center. Our student team will work with professional mentors to perform energy modeling to help design sustainable low-income housing with alternative means of transportation above the municipal bus station.
Environmental Stewardship & Social Justice
The interdisciplinary team of computer science, sustainability studies, and art students have pivoted from their interactive and educational mobile game on recycling literacy to partner with UCSC Resource Recovery and create a waste auditing app for the mobile phone. This app will help streamline UCSC's waste audits to better understand and analyze waste trends over time and create an easily accessible and reliable repository for this data. The app is fully developed and currently undergoing beta testing with student and professional auditors giving feedback to refine the app - we are getting closer to our goal is to create a standardized methodology for on-site waste audits.
Slugbotics is a student organization at UC Santa Cruz focused on introducing students of any major to underwater robotics and hands-on engineering projects. We design, program, fabricate, and test ROVs (Remote Operated Vehicles) that are designed to complete complex tasks in a marine environment, such as removing plastics and debris from our oceans, monitoring ocean temperature and acidification, placing a tidal turbine for wave generated power, riparian restoration and more. The team competes in different national and international competitions each year
The Rocket Team is a student-run organization devoted to all things aerospace and rocketry at UC Santa Cruz. We teach students how to design, build, and launch high-powered amateur rockets in a safe and cooperative environment. Each school year, the team participates in rocket launching competitions, educational outreach events at local middle schools, and research projects on atmospheric science. The team successfully flew its maiden flight in the NASA Student Launch Initiative 2018-19, national engineering design challenge hosted annually by the Marshall Space Flight Center, and is now gearing up for competition in 2022. This feat is one accomplished by only a select few colleges and universities, making UC Santa Cruz a newly impressive contender on one of the largest recognized scales of rocketry.