UW Bothell

A new set of video clips are making their way into classrooms across Washington. The UW’s ground-breaking TV series, Climate of Change, is now available to educators in a collection of convenient sustainability-focused video clips for easy use as a teaching tool. The collection of videos is posted online at www.youtube.com/sustainableUW.

Students, faculty and staff at UW Bothell can now recycle small electronics on campus, thanks to a new partnership with Waste Management. “We evaluated several programs, and ultimately selected the “Cartridges for Kids” project with Waste Management,” says Tony Guererro, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Facilities Services at UW Bothell. The program, which has been used widely in K-12 schools in Washington State, will return a portion of recycling proceeds back to UW Bothell. Guererro says funds could be used to fund student sustainability projects.

As the Northwest considers proposals to build ship terminals to export more U.S. coal to Asia, a University of Washington Bothell team took an unusual route to measuring the air-quality hazard from trains carrying coal to the coast. Unable to fund the project through traditional sources, they went online and found 271 people who were willing to make an average donation of $75 to have experts answer the question.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday its selection of academic partners for the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) University Challenge, a project designed to find innovative ways to increase public awareness of toxic chemical releases in their communities and around the country.

The University of Washington Bothell is among the eight partners the agency selected.

In his 20 years of conducting research, UW Atmospheric Sciences professor Dan Jaffe had always gone the conventional route of writing grant proposals to fund his scientific research projects — until now.

For his current project, he reached out to the general public, which responded by helping him achieve his fundraising goal of $18,000 in 10 days.

His project concerns measuring the environmental impact of coal trains, particularly their impact on air quality and human health.