2019-2020

The ASUW Bike Shop is a student run, full repair bicycle resource for UW students, staff and faculty. Through its affordable drop-off services, do-it-yourself repair, and maintenance classes, the shop seeks to make biking accessible for the UW community as a sustainable alternative to other modes of transportation. The Bike Shop continuously looks to support the campus cycling community’s commitment to climate response. Every year the Bike Shop generates between 150 to 250 pounds of used tube waste, as recycling centers do not accept bike tubes.

Working with the Office of Student Veterans, Living Art, is exploring the therapeutic benefits of artwork being turned into living art (living walls). There are many healing and therapeutic benefits from living walls, including increased productivity and relaxation and we aim to improve spaces associated with student veterans. We hope to bring visual therapeutic benefits, beauty, and overall enjoyment to students in the HUB, particularly students in the study areas.

The goal of this project is to obtain a pulp molding machine capable of making sustainable pots to replace the plastic ones currently being used in the UW nursery. The result will be a decrease in plastic waste being generated, as well as less water and chemicals being consumed to clean the pots. The new pots will also utilize non-woody materials such as wheat straw, brewers spent grain, and even ivy collected from across campus.

With UW air travel nearly eliminated to reduce the spread of COVID-19, the UW community is looking to rethink our options. We want to take this opportunity to examine the unique benefits of travel to UW students, faculty, and staff  in the context of the high cost of emissions from travel - especially as technological solutions for remote collaboration and learning are being rapidly improved and culturally normalized.

With this project, we are proposing a highly collaborative approach to work directly with the Burke Museum and their representatives to engage in the interpretive planning practices and approaches already being developed for the recently installed, on-site Camas Meadow by museum staff and partners. Through this process we anticipate learning a tremendous amount regarding the historical and contemporary importance of this habitat type and source of nourishment for the Indigenous tribes of the Coast Salish region and all of Washington State.

The UW Food Pantry is a flagship project of the Any Hungry Husky Initiative, which works to address food insecurity on the University of Washington-Seattle Campus. The Food Pantry provides foodstuffs such as canned goods, grains, fresh produce, and ready-to-eat meals free of charge to any Husky Card-holding student, staff member, or faculty member. The Food Pantry is currently undergoing a phase of rapid growth: in the last 24 months, total visits have increased over 500% from 748 visits in the 2017-18 academic year to 3,845 in the first two quarters of the 2019-20 year.

Advancements in manufacturing technologies have allowed 3D printers to literally become household items, making them relatively inexpensive rapid prototyping devices for engineering, research, and teaching purposes. This has made them incredibly common on UW’s campus, as they can be found in many classrooms, engineering spaces, and laboratories across disciplines. This invaluable resource has come with a significant environmental drawback as a large amount of the material (known as filament) used to create 3D prints is wasted in the process of creating a final print.