The Green Umbrella is a group of administrators, faculty, staff, and students dedicated to the design and implementation of sustainability-raising initiatives in the Columbia community.

The Department of Administrative Planning & Financial Management is now accepting informal sustainability-raising project proposals. Send us an email, contact an individual student or administrator, or come to one of our meetings.

List last updated 6/18/2006.

Current Projects

• The Group for Environmental Opportunities (GEO) is a collaboration between student representatives and administrative volunteers in University Housing and Dining (UHD). GEO is working on the following projects:

• Lightbulb Exchange    Housing is offering free compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs in exchange for students' old incandescent bulbs. The CFL bulbs have a much greater life span than traditional incandescents and approximately one fourth of the power requirement to provide equal illumination. Further, the CFL bulbs' lower temperature eliminates the fire hazard posed by incandescent desk lamps. Finally, we estimate that by purchasing a $5 CFL bulb, UHD will save over $100 in energy costs over the 10,000-hour life of the bulb.

• Eco-Reps    We are working to institutionalize a framework for students to become leaders and information conduits for environmental stewardship issues in their dorms. The system will be based loosely on the Residential Advisor (RA) framework, and will compensate students for their work.

• Give & Go Green    UHD and GEO have contacted City Harvest and Salvation Army, which will bring trucks to campus at the end of the semester to collect donations of food, clothing, and other miscellanea that would have otherwise been thrown away.

• Creating a Procedure for Implementing Sustainability-Raising Projects    In collaboration with Scott Wright and Wil McKoy, we're working to create a procedural framework for reviewing, funding, and implementing projects that foster environmental stewardship on campus. The framework may be based loosely on this request for proposals.

Potential Projects

• Comprehensive Environmental Impact Assessment A long-term and logistically challenging but critical component to measuring and maximizing the effectiveness of Columbia's attempts to reduce overall environmental impact. In addition to measuring impact, such a project would need to establish channels for which relevant data could be easily gathered and verified in the future.

• Green Roof Design (Research) An interesting and promising concept that, if demonstrated to be cost-effective on a building-by-building basis, could help ameliorate the urban heat island effect. A feasibility study would be conducted for a particular building, followed by a series of design proposals. Implementation would have as its goal the evaluation of the concept in practice.

• "Flyer Reduction" A web application not entirely unlike the now-defunct CUCommunity platform, aimed at improving communication among student groups, faculty, staff, and administrators in the Columbia community and at reducing the need for paper flyering (and the waste generated thereby). The application should be integrated with or built over existing frequently-used platforms like CubMail.

• Green Design Competition An annual competition seeking Columbia-specific technological and logistical proofs-of-concept and cost-benefit analyses for sustainability-raising initiatives. The project competition may be undertaken in collaboration with the Engineering Student Council, and may become the long-term platform for evaluating, funding, and implementing long-term sustainability-enhancing projects on campus (see above).