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CSERC part-time associate Julia Stephens proved that dedicated efforts by an individual just might produce big results. Her efforts helped the local Columbia College to get a $35,000 grant for revitalizing its struggling recycling program.
Last spring, CSERC’s part-time environmental associate -- Julia Stephens --went looking for an independent research project at Columbia College, where she was enrolled. She approached her teacher-mentor, Professor Ted Hamilton, and through a lot of dialogue and research, Julia came up with the goal of helping the Columbia College campus to be more “sustainable.”
Not exactly sure how to do that, she met with the college’s administration and facilities department to look for ways for the campus to be more energy efficient and less wasteful. She joined the newly formed faculty-led Sustainability Committee on campus, and she even attended a “sustainability conference for colleges” that was held in Santa Barbara.
Pulling together ideas and information, she eventually narrowed down a wide range of opportunities into the most effective goal she could find to make a meaningful difference. That goal was to significantly improve and enhance the campus’s extremely limited recycling program, which was sorely lacking in materials, staff, and funding. The program was being held together with a handful of volunteers and some assistance from the Facilities Department. Although the college supported the concept and agreed on the importance of recycling, the funding to actually develop and upgrade an effective recycling program on campus was not in their budget. It was uncertain when or if that necessary money would ever become available.
Julia decided that if something could be done to markedly improve and expand recycling on campus, that effort could divert years’ worth of recyclable materials from the college’s waste stream. It would also reduce demand for more aluminum cans, more paper, more plastic, and other base materials. She began researching possible grants on the Internet and came across the California Department of Conservation Beverage Container Recycling grant. Reading the guidelines she felt that Columbia College might be a good match for the grant. She approached the Sustainability Committee and Facilities Department for permission to get the detailed information needed for the grant application. Working closely with key faculty and staff members, namely Raelene Juarez and Jon Sterling, Julia and the rest of her team gathered statistics through waste audits, laid out a long term plan for the recycling program, designed a way to keep track of recycling efforts, and figured out how much funding was needed to buy supplies and hire a student to manage the recyclable materials.
With all these details in hand, Julia and her associates put together a lengthy grant application. Almost seven months from the conception of this effort, the college was notified that it had been awarded the full grant request -- $35,000! With this money, Columbia College is now working to set up a significantly improved and enhanced Recycling Program so that in a year’s time, the program will hopefully be paying for itself through the money saved on waste disposal and the money earned on CRV containers.
On one hand this is a story that shows that a college student can work well with her college staff to develop a promising recycling program and that she can effectively justify a grant by her dedicated efforts and the cooperation that was shown by her collaborative team.
What may be even more important is to see that the interest and efforts of one young woman has now helped to reduce a lot of waste by a very broad college family of users, ranging from staff to students to contractors and consultants. Julia’s visionary efforts paid off with a huge grant that will hopefully plant the seeds for a long-term and effective recycling program. 
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