Green Leaf: post-consumer paper

So i have decided i'm going to start a weekly entry with quick easy tips on making your life more green. I'm going to call them Green Leaves so that if you put them all together it is like making a green tree full of green ideas. 

This first green leaf is about post-consumer paper. For all your printing and photo-copying needs (ok all office paper needs really, but we will start with the printers and photo-copiers) try and have at least 30% post-consumer paper. Post-consumer paper is just as bright as normal virgin paper, so get all the rumors about it not being out of your head. Post-consumer paper is also much more environmentally friendly. It takes much less energy and resources to make than virgin paper. Further more there is no bleach and other harmful chemicals in it like virgin paper. You can get it at all your local office supply stores as well so you don't even have to go out of your way to get it. It is true it is a little more expensive, but you'll feel good about doing something healthy for the earth! Here are some links to stores: Office Max 30% (if you want to go even further: Office Max 100%) and  Staples 50%  (or for 100%). 

Don't forget to then recycle your paper when your done with it!

Advisory questions

What do you want out of the last three months of your ILP and how are you going to get it?
I want to actually get somewhere and have some sort of actual evidence that we are getting something done. I think that is going to involve something with a recycling program

What are the things that you could use to do further research from your ILP
My whole ILP of learning about sustainability and greening the school can be furthered into my capstone project. There is so much more that i could be reading, learning and doing if i had more time to do so other than 2hrs a week.

How could your ILP experience improve?
My ILP could improve by actually knowing really what i have to be doing. All the mentors that i have been working with have kinda dropped out and i'm no longer really hearing from them.

If an SLA student were to do your ILP again, what suggestions you would make?
If another student were to do my ILP i would say make sure you have a strong mentor to start out with. That you have other people to bounce ideas off of. And really make sure you keep a journal about what you are doing. A journal that gets updated more than once a month (if that)

A Very Late Educon Reflecton

So I know this is extremely late, but better late than never right?
Our Educon presentation went very well. We had very few people in our room though, and Peter never showed up which we though he would. Robert and I had to kind of ad-lib the part of the presentation where Peter was supposed to talk. Other than that things went smoothly.
Meg Peterson a student from Canada came to our talk and we had a great time afterwards talking to her about things that her school was doing and what we thought we could have both schools do to become more green. One thought was to set up a wikispace that connected the two schools where we could post what we were doing and photos. So far we have not gone on to actually put that into action, but hopefully we will talk soon again and do something.
I did find that this Educon was not as helpful as last year.

March update!

So here is another quick update on our project.

* Jason has still to get back to us with the calculations from his computer
* Went and saw Edinburgh University and saw their green building. (whole side with solar panels!)
* Finished my english project

Waste in the Philadelphia School District

View more presentations from Alison . (tags: waste sla)

* Presented with Robert Y. at educon 2.1! that went really well
* Proposal put together and sent out for a USGBC Green Build conference in November in AZ.
* Trying to call the school district to talk to them about recycling
* Researching recycling programs in the area
* Writing a 500 word essay about how our school is green for a contest

Quick update!

So a very quick update on our project:
* Jason has helped me with an energy model of our school over winter break (more to come, including calculations hopefully!)
* went to visit the new California Academy of Sciences in San Fransisco! (hopefully a blog entry to come with photos!)
* working on dealing with recycling in the School District of Philadelphia in connection with an English project (English project information to come)
* Getting ready to present at Educon 2.1 on Sunday Jan 25th!
* Putting together another proposal for a USGBC Green Build conference in November in AZ.

Thats all for now. Hopefully the new year will mean that i will write more on here.

Wiki update

Go check out the wikipage for new info on the SLA building. Robert and I counted all the lights and windows in the building so we have that info for our energy audit.

New Year New Chapter

So a little late, but better late than never right? As the new school year starts it has stirred up new excitement for this project. First off we have a new member of our crew! Robert Yemola has joined us this year. Last year he was working with a company called SmartPower and this year he is bringing his expertise to us. I will post the link here to his blog when he sets one up.

So an update to the project. In some ways we are in the same place we were at the end of last year and in other ways we have moved far beyond that. We are in the same place because we still do not have a carbon footprint or energy usage of the building. HOWEVER after a TON of searching and asking the experts we have found someone to help us out. His name is Jason and he works for Green Dinosaur which is a company that creates buildings that are low on energy consumption. Jason is going to help Robert and I to create a model of our school building through this program which will give us the energy consumption of the building. So soon we should have an energy audit completed. Also this summer as i was traveling around i saw and observed many windmills (there are a lot in Scandinavia!) I had no idea there were so many different designs. Some had really long skinny blades and others had short fat blades. I'm hoping to get the chance to look into why there are different shapes and when to use the different types. Also this summer I picked up many books of ways to green the office or to teach kids about global warming and how to live green. They were very interesting books and I will add the titles to the wikispace shortly.
That is where we are at the moment. Hopefully the ball will really start rolling shortly when we have the energy audit done.