U-M students, faculty share sustainable ideas
From living trash-free to building a straw house, U-M has a history of challenging students, faculty and staff to directly take on issues, and sustainability is an area where they have shone.
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Students and faculty from across many disciplines have personally explored what it means to be sustainable. Here is a collection of blogs, videos and news articles capturing some of these amazingly green stories:
• Trash-free for 365 days: Darshan Karwat, doctoral student, chronicles his year-long journey to live trash free. The result of his efforts; only 7.5 pounds of trash produced.
• Water for all: Cynthia Koenig, recent graduate of Stephen M. Ross School of Business, reinvented the wheel by creating WaterWheel, a barrel to transport water in developing countries, and its distribution company Wello.
• Off-the-grid Internet: E-MAGINE, led by student director Rama Mwenesi, brought a solar-powered, cell-phone-based Internet system to rural Kenya this summer.
• A new spin on the merry-go-round: Graduate students from the student group, Sustainability Without Borders, built a merry-go-round to generate electricity to light a rural African schoolhouse. They also worked with colleagues from Clemson University to design and install a toilet system that creates biogas to fuel the school's kitchen stove and a solar-powered produce dehydrator for foods.
• We built this house: Joe Trumpey, associate professor of art in the School of Art & Design, designed and built a solar-heated, water-cooled straw-bale house in Grass Lake.