University of Victoria
AC-8: Campus as a Living Laboratory

In 2012, Assistant Professor Dr. Basma Majerbi, as the Operations chair of the Centre for Social and Sustainable Innovation, hired a work-study student to research the feasibility of Gustavson establishing a Green Fund to purchase carbon offsets for faculty, staff and student Scope Three travel emissions.

A Psychology PhD student working under Dr. Robert Gifford designed, conducted, and published a study on the use of visual prompts in bathrooms at UVic which showed that when a sticker was placed in the bathroom that requested people turn off the lights when the room was empty the odds that the light would be turned off was significantly higher.

In 2011 a student examined the an activist event on campus relative to a part of UVic lawn being dug up to create a garden space. The event was the source of significant conflict between the gardeners and the University and an article called "Fertilizing Problems" documents that conflict in an academic paper :http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/peninsula/article/view/5440/1927

A engineering masters student working under Dr. Curran Crowford used his thesis work to provide a presentation a biomass heating option to member of the Office of Campus Planning and Sustainability, and Facilities Management.

In one cross listed sustainability focused course, Ecological Restoration (ES 341/ER 311), one of the class projects requires student to construct an ecological restoration plan for areas on campus, which involves the consultation with staff and administrators. This major course project that has both an individual component and a group component. Each person in the class focuses on one of the following five major components of a restoration design (there is some flexibility in defining these categories to respond to individual project needs): • Site description and problem identification • Develop restoration goals (using reference conditions/sites, consultation and so on) • Formulate a plan for achieving restoration goals (activities, interventions, etc.) • Budget and timeline • Monitoring plan Teams of students select the restoration project, meet regularly to compare notes and exchange ideas, and ultimately assemble the individual components into a coherent design document, which could be accessed upon request by administrators.

The course Marketing Principles and Management, Com351 focused on pricing in UVic food services and included a class discussion case and an analysis of UVic's buying local and buying fair trade policies impact on pricing.

UVic's Engineering Faculty participates in EcoCAR2 challenge, which is a three-year collegiate advanced vehicle technology engineering competition established by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and General Motors (GM), and is being managed by Argonne National Laboratory. The competition challenges 16 universities across North America to reduce the environmental impact of vehicles by minimizing the vehicle’s fuel consumption and reducing its emissions while retaining the vehicle’s performance, safety and consumer appeal. Students use a real-world engineering process to design and integrate their advanced technology solutions into a GM-donated vehicle. UVic students working on this project are part of the EcoCAR team (http://ecocar.uvic.ca/) and work on designing and building advanced propulsion solutions that are based on vehicle categories from the California Air Resources Board (CARB) zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) regulations. They explore a variety of cutting-edge clean vehicle solutions, including full-function electric, range-extended electric, hybrid, plug-in hybrid and fuel cell technologies. In addition, students will incorporate lightweight materials into the vehicles, improve aerodynamics and utilize alternative fuels such as ethanol, biodiesel and hydrogen. Teams are following a real-world approach modeled after GM’s global vehicle development process (GVDP), giving students valuable experience in real-world engineering practices, resource allocation and meeting deliverables. While previous student engineering competitions focused primarily on hardware modifications, EcoCAR includes a unique focus on modeling and simulation, as well as subsystem development and testing. During the three-year program, General Motors will provide vehicles, vehicle components, seed money, technical mentoring and operational support. The U.S. Department of Energy and its research and development facility, Argonne National Laboratory, will provide competition management, team evaluation and technical and logistical support. Through sponsoring such advanced vehicle engineering competitions, GM and the U.S. Department of Energy are helping to develop the next generation of scientists and engineers.

One student in ES 480: Cultural Politics of Climate Change course, created a coffee cup structure as part of here final project that illustrates the tensions of the "composting is good" discourse in public that is driving a kind of frenzy of composting and compostable-consumer products without a critical attention to the waste streams that are part of composting (and pick-up) as a new widely-accepted system. The student was able to integrate her structure into a University waste reduction campaign called "Love a Mug" which aimed to reduce the use of paper cups by discouraging their use while promoting the use of reusable mugs.

A student working in the Studies in Policy and Practice program (MA) completed a thesis entitled "Taking on Water" that broke down the discourse of the debate occurring on Campus in 2012 regarding the student push to ban bottled water on campus, which was eventually undertaken in the Student Union Building food outlets and vending machines.

A group of students has undertaken a major campus planning initiative called UVision. The end goal of this project is to constructing a report in anticipation of a campus planning exercise in 2014 regarding their ideas about how UVic might develop its campus space over the next 10 years.

One student campaign involved increasing responsible investing with UVic moneys, and engaged the administration's Assistant Treasurer in an educational event regarding the current state of UVic investment policy and the potential limitation to using pension funds in BC for the purpose of investing in, for example, wind energy as opposed to petro-fuels.

This section articulates several initiatives in which the campus has been used for applied research purposes. These are in the areas of air and climate, buildings, energy, grounds, water, and waste. There are several initiatives that cannot be claimed as they have no known specific academic ties in which university students, or the university itself, have been involved. These include projects that UVic has partnered on a project such as, "Ready Set Solve" (http://www.crd.bc.ca/climatechange/readysetsolve.htm), which engaged students in real world issues faced by local government organizations, and not for profits organizations. The most recent iteration of the program involved engaging UVic students in helping solve waste (paper towel use) and transportation (campus cycling master plan) issues at UVic. While the initiatives above cannot be claimed through this credit, they do contribute, in a sense, to UVic being as a Living Laboratory.