By Karina Mazhukhina | Apr 16, 2016
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2016 award winner Melanie Wade with her UW Volleyball teammates.Update 4/18: Melanie Wade was named one of seven 2016 Husky Green Award winners.

UW fans know Melanie Wade for her contributions to the Husky volleyball team, including All-Pac-12 Honorable Mention nods her junior and senior year. Off the court, she's worked throughout her career to implement sustainability initiatives within the UW athletic department and across the campus as a whole.

Wade is the student-athlete representative for the athletic department sustainability committee, and worked for a summer an an intern with Karen Baebler, the chair of the committee, where she was in charge of creating a social media presence on Facebook and Twitter (including creating ECO, the stuffed husky who is the face of the GoGreenHuskies twitter account). She also worked with the athletic department staff to create three short videos that encouraged fans to compost and highlighted the importance of composting and recycling. They were featured in the Alaska Airlines Arena during volleyball season.

Wade pushed to get composting in the volleyball team locker, and helped with a research study measuring waste in the HUB to learn more about how people were disposing of food items. Wade is also conducting her own research for her social psychology class to see how different environmental advertisements, pro-environment and anti-environment, affect environmental issues.

The Husky Green Awards recognize the top environmental leaders at the University of Washington. Individuals or groups from all UW campuses are nominated by faculty, staff and students. We'll be featuring many of the 2016 nominees on the blog this month. The winners will be announced on April 18, with an award ceremony during the April 22 Earth Day celebrations on Red Square.

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