Carbon Grant 2025

The broad goal of this project is to localize the management of food waste generated by student residents in The Village through composting at the B-Quad Garden. By doing so, our plan reduces greenhouse gas emissions by keeping waste out of landfills, and eliminates the transportation emissions associated with its management. Further, our project advocates for at-home and community composting both on campus, and in the broader Santa Cruz community, and disseminates composting knowledge to those communities.

Goals:

1. Implement a 2025 Compost Engineering Challenge, which invites UCSC students to design and build a composting system. Systems will be evaluated on their effectiveness at transforming food scraps into compost, rodent-proofness and weather-proofness, cost-effectiveness, and ease of building. 

Update (06/23/2025): Students have designed and built their compost systems for the 2025 Compost Engineering Challenge. Compost systems will be tested until December 2025.

2. Organize a food waste collection system from the UCSC Village residents. Collected food waste will be used as a source for feeding the 2025 Compost Engineering Challenge systems.

Update (06/23/2025): Food waste collection system has been organized. Food waste is collected in The Village Kitchen and picked up three times a week to feed the compost systems in the Tierra Viva garden.

3. Evaluate the carbon and nitrogen of compost produced with different ratios of brown materials (high in carbon) and green materials (high in nitrogen).