Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Rob Melnick: I’m told we’re going to start on time so since it’s 7:00 I want to welcome you all to the Global Institute of Sustainability. My name is Rob Melnick, hello. I’m an administrator here at the Institute and welcome to the 10x5 Showcase. This is part of the Earth Week celebration. We have a lot of activities. I think some of them were illustrated and explained on the screen. Some of the activities that we’re promoting and this was one of them.

I was not at this event last year, this is the second annual event, but from everything I heard it was absolutely terrific. The day after we had this event last year people were talking about it with great excitement. Even one of the most curmudgeoned faculty members who I work with, a complete and total pessimist about almost everything actually had to admit that he had fun and he had a good time. Some of you know who he is, he’s actually sort of an associate, not a faculty member.

I am proud to say one of your speakers tonight actually took the time to totally disrespect me in his presentation last year with a very silly slide. One of the reasons that I’m here tonight is not only just to welcome you but keep him honest because I know where he lives.

[Laughter]

Melnick: With that in mind I just want to thank you for coming tonight and to enjoy what has been described among other things as kind of a speed dating kind of situation here. Where we’re going to hear from people both associated with ASU directly, students and staff at the Global Institute and elsewhere as well as people from the community to celebrate, to understand how they’re engaging with sustainability. That’s the mission of the Global Institute to work not only in ASU but outside of ASU as well. To help people, not just students, people throughout the community to create more sustainable future.

I’m happy to introduce our M.C. for the night, Brian McCollow, who is a senior, right?

Brian McCollow: Yes.

Melnick: From the school of sustainability and I leave you in his capable hands.

Thank you.

[Applause]

McCollow: Thanks Rob.

To build off of what Rob said we wanted to keep this event, lively, quick and engaging and so the dimensions of this evening are 10x5. We have ten wonderful presentations that will all be given to you in five minutes.

To kick it off we’re going to start with Colin, and he’s made his way up into the reins of policy advisor to Phoenix’s mayor Greg Stanton.

We move to Colin.

[Applause]

Colin Tetreault: Thank you Brian.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Wow, that’s a hot mike. How is everyone? All right, do I start now? All right, we’ll go ahead right .

Well my name is Colin Tetreault and I am a faculty associate here at the school of sustainability where I teach on business and sustainability strategies. I like to joke that I teach hippies how to make money and capitalists how to have a heart. Put them together and that’s what we get. That was supposed to be a joke.

[Laughter]

Tetreault: Hopefully the rest of the presentation will be better. What are we here to talk to you about tonight? Talking turkey, used car salesman, marketing and sustainability. Actually this is a picture of me from earlier this week, no actually I’m just kidding.

Audience: [Inaudible 3:41].

Tetreault: All right, I lost a lot of weight, you know? Actually people they said at the mayor’s office they said they want to more of a crowd around the office so I decided to put on weight. See here we go an even better joke.

Let’s talk turkey, what do we want? We’re sustainability advocates, we’re talking—I’m just—is this thing going in and out?

Audience: It’s really hot.

Tetreault: All right, we’re just going to talk like this. How about that?

Audience: [Inaudible 4:02].

Tetreault: Fantastic. What do we want is sustainability advocates, people who are passionate about these sorts of things. Of course we want happiness, right? We want rabbits, who doesn’t love adorable, beautiful bunny rabbits? Raise your hand up if you hate rabbits. Right, okay.

[Laughter]

Tetreault: Those wascally rabbit. What else do we want? We want things like double rainbows, right? Oh my gosh a double rainbow happiness from side to side, oh my God what does it mean? Do you all get that or not?

[Laughter]

Tetreault: Think about this—

Audience: You have to use the microphone.

Tetreault: I’m using the mike, okay not a problem.

Audience: Hold it like ten inches away.

Tetreault: Ten inches away, how ‘bout that?

Audience: Right there, perfect.

Tetreault: Okay, how about here? Very good.

Audience: [Inaudible 4:47]

Tetreault: Ahhh. All right we want happiness as sustainability advocates, right, people who are working to champion us in unique and nonlinear ways. That’s the end goal, right?

Anyone here object to things like breathing clean air, drinking clean water? Anyone want a bad place for your kids or maybe you grandkids to hang out and grow up? Okay good, so we all kind of agree on the end points, right? Well this is what we say often in the sustainability science and policy world, well there’s a lot of really big, funny odd terms like psammology, dynamic equilibrium, strategic forecasting and reflex imaging. What the heck do any of those mean?

Hmm, you know what those sound like? Those are a whole bunch of features. Has anyone here purchased a used car? No, yes?

Audience: Yes.

Tetreault: Okay, raise your hand if you purchased a used car. Fantastic, interesting experience working with that used car dealer, right? We’re going to talk about why they’re fantastic and some interesting things that we as sustainability as science and practitioners could potentially learn from them.

This is what we get though, we think of the double rainbows, we think of the rabbits, we talk about that but that’s what we get, period. We talk in these big, fancy words, working with community members, anyone know that slide? That is how to win the war in Afghanistan according to the United States Military.

This, I kid you not, was an actual slide in a PowerPoint presentation, literal death by PowerPoint. What else do we get? I had to throw this in here, we get confused, right? Sorry, had to have a little bit of fun there.

Our future, really what is our future when we think about sales, marketing, sustainability? How do we really communicate these things in the most effective ways. Remember it’s always knowing your audience, right?

Our future is Kurt Russell from the 1980’s movie Cars, anyone remember that? It was a big hit in the box office; like three people went to see it.

[Laughter]

Tetreault: It went straight to VHS I think. Why is this fantastic? I think the used car metaphor is an interesting one because what have we learned in used car sales? Make friends, not enemies. If people like you, they’re—again we’re right there. Actually that’s me with the bowtie, right there. If people like you, they’re far more inclined to want to work with you. People don’t like you fundamentally speaking, why am I gonna work with that individual?

Well hey, you know what? How do we build credibility, credence and establish all of our credentials? Well you know how they do that, trust me don’t worry oh I’d sell you this car, my girlfriend drives the same one. All right? They establish credibility, anyone remember that movie? I think it was 1987, License to Drive. Again another big box office smash hit.

This is going really, really, really well, right? All right so as well they talk in stories. This is something that they do very, very well. That smooth talking, used car salesman. What do we mean by that?

We have two options here, wa-wa-wa-wa-wah Charlie Brown, right? That kind of classic unit directional lecture approach when it comes to aspects of sustainability. We’re right, this is what we’re going to impart unto you. How do we actually shift to something more like the Reading Rainbow model?

Who remembers Reading Rainbow? Everyone under 45 should raise their hand, absolutely. Anyone not know? Fantastic, I’m done oh my gosh we’re going to go.

Let’s talk turkey though, we’ve got to sell. We’re going to go right past that, really need to get down into order and it’s going to understand the common language between each other. It’s not selling on features it’s selling on benefit.

It’s not red, oh sir this lovely shade of maroon makes you look handsome and/or sexy. It’s not getting 45 miles to the gallon, it’s you can save money in your budget or you can drive like heck, it’s your choice. How do we sell? Not on features but we sell on benefit.

We all want double rainbows and we all want rabbits. How do we actually communicate that in effective manners moving forward?

Thank you.

[Applause]

McCollow: Next up we’re going to have Darren Chapman of the Tiger Mountain Foundation. The Tiger Mountain Foundation does quite a few different things in East Valley and I’ll just keep taking my time until Darren gets up here.

Darren Chapman: All right.

McCollow: Now that he’s here I’ll let you tell more about that.

Chapman: Hello everyone. Oh what is this man, this came from the mayor’s office here. Man I got to be careful, this might be a sustainability trap. Got five whole minutes Doreen, watch this sister. Right. I got Kadesia. Kadesia, what’s something going on in your neighborhood that troubles you?

Audience: Drugs.

Chapman: Drugs, you got drugs, well give me some.

[Laughter]

Chapman: What about you Anthony?

Audience: The graffiti.

Chapman: Graffiti.

Audience: People walking the street and cars just go by and ignore them.

Chapman: Wow, people just walking the streets where there’s no crosswalks or lights.

What about you Jose?

Audience: Gangs.

Chapman: Gangs? Wow.

Audience: [Inaudible 10:15].

Chapman: [Inaudible 10:16] Come on ya’all, we can all do it together we still got three minutes. What about you Kyle?

Audience: Abuse of the environment.

Chapman: Abuse of the environment. Okay, I’m a very lucky man because I figured out the key to sustainability at least in my own personal life and it’s actually going back into my community and trying to help that community with some of the different things that these beautiful guys have talked about, OK?

Now with that being said Kadesia, what’s some of the solutions that you’ve seen so far that we’ve been doing maybe over in Tiger Mountain Foundation?

Audience: Cleaning up the empty lots that have the drugs in them and making them safer.

Chapman: Cleaning up the empty lots that have the drugs in ‘em.

Anthony?

Audience: Painting over the graffiti, instead painting a mural.

Chapman: Painting over the graffiti and putting murals. You should to see some of the beautiful murals these guys have done recently.

Jose?

Audience: They have been putting sidewalks between the streets [Voice fading11:15].

Chapman: There’s been like—and we’ve been actually trying to affect policy and showing these young guys how to affect policy to put sidewalks in some of those intersections where people literally have just been getting ran down. Not to be confused with Jose, but Jose.

Audience: People who come out of jail, we take them to Tiger Mountain Foundation and we give them a job for [Inaudible 11:40].

Chapman: Affecting recidivism, remember sustainability and they’re coming from the youth of our community, the answers, right? So sustainability for us is for these youth’s to grow up into adults, right? Already having some of the answers.

Thank you Braden and Colin, these guys have accepted me to come of some of their different meetings to try to talk about some of the things that we’re doing extremely well.

Kyle, what about you man?

Audience: Just reinvesting in the community and giving the pride to the youth as well as the older people reaching out to the youth to help them develop as overall individuals.

Chapman: Reinvesting in the community, Kyle stays in that community, lives in that community, he comes back he helps the youth and the adults and the seniors. It’s a multi-ethic, intergenerational asset based community development model, right? Because if these—even if you got a third grade education, right? You’re 50 years old you gotta home right here to build empowerment. Not on government cheese, right? Empowerment, right?

Not food stamps but empowerment. Sustainability is actually getting back into the dirt, right? We just use it as an analogy. We build gardens, yeah the kids are at the farmer’s markets, that’s all fantastic but we’re actually growing people, OK?

Did I do that in five minutes? Thank you very much.

[Applause]

McCollow: Thanks Darren, that viewpoint of sustainability is absolutely critical. Engaging the community and engaging all different generations.

Next up we’re going to have Deborah Thirkhill come up and she’s going to talk about what she’s up to at ASU. She’s from the Phoenix Zoo and worked her way to the Botanical Gardens but now she’s at ASU’s Arboretum.

Deborah Thirkhill: How do I use this?

[Applause]

Thirkhill: Thank you so much. I don’t think I could beat this one over here [inaudible 13:35] seen coffee grounds in a plant before. Anyways I’m Deborah Thirkhill and how many people know where the arboretum at ASU is located?

Oh you know already but not too many people. How many hands go up, just a few. The entire campus is the arboretum and we have a collection of all kinds of rare plants from around the world located on our campus. Anyways we have a lot of different initiatives we’ve done in the past couple years.

Mainly getting our compost cycle started, it was a lot of work trying to find somebody off grounds that will do our compost or work or compost. We tried to do it on campus but a lot of people don’t know what that looks like and they’re confused when they see it.

We had a lot of calls when we tried to start our compost over on Alpha Drive. People were calling and going there’s Mexicans dumping stuff and I went those aren’t Mexicans that’s Americans and those are us.

[Laughter]

Thirkhill: That’s us, but anyways so nobody wants it in their backyard so we’ve moved it off campus about five miles away. We thought—we won an award for that and we thought we’d go ahead and just leave it that. We got a compost cycle, we take about 12 tons of compost or green waste off the campus, we compost it, we bring it back, we use it all over our arboretum, all over in our planters and stuff.

We thought we’d leave it at that, but we have students working with us and students are always pushing and pushing and they never take no for an answer. I’m really up here subbing for two students on our crew, the ground services crew, Vacente Solus and Riggoberto Palonco.

They never say—click.

Kim: Oh.

Thirkhill: How do you do that? Here do that for me. Click it till we see them. Well anyways they never take no for an answer and they were told no over and over by the supervisor. No you can’t do that, no we—we’re doing fine with our compost, no we don’t want anything else. There they are right there. Riggo and Vacente.

Anyways, they’d been wanting to use something else besides compost, hydrolyzed fish solution and compost tea. Has everybody smelled the hydrolyzed fish solution yet? It smells terrible, it smells like fish. Anyways, they thought coffee, what’s better to smell in the morning than coffee? Let’s put coffee all over the place.

They started together, they worked on it, they had to get Airmark online—oh could you click back, click back to I think there’s six different, go back, there’s six different Airmark places that have coffee. One more, there you go. The E2, Burning B, Oasis and that’s Burning B with a B but that’s Barrett, Starbucks at the Palo Verde, MU, the bookstore and WP Carry.

They had to get everybody together and thanks to—and then people don’t return your phone calls if you’re a student. They just kept calling, never took no for an answer and they finally got Katrina Shum to finally answer a phone call and put this program together.

The hardest thing is working out a roll out plan, what is this gonna look like, who’s all involved. She helped them put that plan together and train everybody, get everybody onboard, where to put it, what it’s gonna look like and pick it up. They managed to pick up 350 pounds a week now. Which we thought wow that’s really cool and then was it University of Maryland said we do 7,000 pounds a week which that’s an amazing amount of coffee drinking.

I’m just amazed by that but I guess they—back east they need to drink a lot of coffee. We’re real happy to have this on campus and that generates quite a bit. We’ve been using it all over. Their test plot is over there at Gammage. They have some before and after photographs but I didn’t get that in there. You see a lot of the green—I think it’s the front part that they’re working on and you can see that it’s really a bright green. It’s just like compost, it’s slow release, it has a lot of minerals in it and the minerals I believe are potassium, phosphorus and copper and one more? There you go, oh thank you that’s the slide that I want you to see this because that’s the slide she made for ‘em, so it shows you there.

It’s all slow release as it’s decomposing into the ground. I believe jump starts the nutrient or the microbes. We throw it on our roses, has anybody seen our gorgeous, gigantic roses over there at the music building? It’s on the corner right there at Gammage Parkway and Mill Avenue.

That’s something that people drive by on the outside of campus and they’re just gigantic roses and so it seems to work really well. Of course people who raise roses have been using the coffee grounds for a long time. It’s really nice to have that all collected and go ahead and throw a bunch down me and my volunteer and we’ve done those roses and a couple others so it looks really nice.

Oh stop, okay Alana quick, get it up. Finish it up.

[Laughter]

Audience: [Inaudible 18:59]

McCollow: I’ll distract, I’ll distract.

Thirkhill: Okay keep distracting, keep distracting.

McCollow: The clicker was never part of my job duties.

Thirkhill: Okay, thank you.

McCollow: Thanks Deborah and to follow-up we’re going to have Alana come up and talk about what she’s up to also at ASU with recycling and waste management. As soon as she gets over here to talk she’ll [inaudible 19:30].

Alana Levine: I do need that, thank you. I do. I pulled some things out of the thrash can that make me mad because they’re great visuals for what I’m going to talk about. Just in case anybody’s wondering Deborah and I spend probably about 60 hours a week together because we work side-by-side and we’re kinda the Abbot and Costello of the campus when it comes to the grounds.

Let me click through. I’m actually going to zoom out on this issue which is basically organics in our waste stream. It is a form of recycling, what we’re doing right now we are actually what Deborah mentioned we’re doing about 140 tons of green waste, which is our yard trimmings, our branches, the grass, all that kind of stuff. We’re actually doing a lot of that.

We have another component of our waste stream and that is food waste. Let me put this down here. Ah, so freedom. Okay, so let’s look at our municipal solid waste generation. I’m now gonna go through this very quick. These are EPA standards, we have about 14 percent of our waste stream what we on average produce as Americans.

We do about 14 percent food scraps at ASU it’s probably about that maybe just slightly lower on what we produce on campus. This is 33.79 million tons of food scraps that are produced in the United States. Less than three percent of that is actually recycled or recovered. We’re not really composting that much, we’re sending it to things like waste to energy.

If we recycled or sent to waste to energy 50 percent of our food scraps in the U.S. we could power 2.5 million homes for one year. Kind of moving on really quickly here we have actually a hierarchy of getting rid of our food waste and ASU’s currently looking for some of those solutions.

We have of course the initial one is source reduction. That’s what we really want to do and we’re doing things like trayless dining, we’re doing portion control, we’re looking at our purchasing habits, things like that.

We are feeding hungry people, there is the Good Samaritan Act, kind of like the one that tells you that you can’t be sued if you try to give someone the Heimlich. We have on that says you can’t really be sued or liable if you are an organization who is in goodwill giving food to a food bank or to another organization.

We take advantage of that at ASU. We also do things like ditch the dumpster where we give out food. All the kids that are moving out of their—kids I’m so sorry. All of the students that are moving out of the residence halls. I won’t call them dorms either back in my day. They are donating their food to local food banks, to charities, things like that.

Industrial uses, we do send our FOG, that’s fats, oils, greases, we do send that to be made into biodiesel. We’re planning on possibly doing that on campus, utilizing our own FOG to make our own biodiesel.

The possibility of digestion, off campus digesters and that’s turning it into biogas to make energy, possibly building one on campus but those things are not very attractive.

We do compost, again our tree waste, our yard trimmings, we’re sending that off to traditional windrowing which are those big rows of that kind of dirt looking stuff that you can see if you go online. It’s kind of what we all think of when we think of getting rid of any kind of organic waste.

Our green waste is again we’re doing about I would say about 95 percent of our green waste is actually making it off campus into composting. Then coming back to campus to do things like fertilizer campus harvest and things like that. The possibility is to do some in vessel off campus again to handle that food waste. We’re talking about those organics, those other parts of our organic waste stream.

What we’re currently doing, we’re actually basically sending it to the landfill. We’re not burning it, which is a good thing like some areas in California or back east, they actually still burn some things. There’s questions always, are we sinking carbon when we send it off to the landfill? Then that produces methane but then we harvest that for energy but then, but then, but then.

The easiest thing to do, look at that top tier and go for that source reduction. When we pull out and look at this even further we look at global statistics, industrialized nations. We do about 670 million tons of food is wasted. When we look at developing nations 630 million tons, now these are at different points of axis in the supply chain.

We’re looking at things like industrialized nations, we’re looking at things like post-consumer, we’re throwing out a lot. Our portion control’s really bad. Things like our tomato doesn’t look exactly like what we idealize a tomato as. Now in developing nations it’s more like we don’t have refrigerated trucks so we have trouble getting stuff to another place in the country.

We’re looking at two totally different places in the supply chain. When we look at that we create packaging and then pulling out even further as solid waste we create all this packaging. Things like the stuff that I found in the trash.

We create in order to contain our materials, in order to we use a lot of energy, we use a lot of gas. We’re using all of this packaging. Now these are the recyclable things. We do things like 80 billion cans a year.

Okay, so they’re telling me to stop. The lesson here is don’t stop drinking coffee but just use a reusable cup, please.

[Applause]

McCollow: Part of the reason why we do this in five minutes is to stress all of the speakers out and make it more interesting. Next up we’re going to have Doug Bland come up, who is in a very interesting role. Not only is he a pastor but he’s the president of the Arizona Interfaith Power and Light.What he does is bring different relationships together and talk about religious response to climate change.

Doug Bland: Thank you. I’m actually filling somebody else’s shoes tonight but I wanted people to blame and so I’m filling those shoes for him and hope I can do a decent job.

I want to tell ya about Arizona Interfaith Power and Light, it’s Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists joining together not just to change light bulbs but change lives and change public policy as well. We had an event last September 24th called 350.org Moving the Planet. We started at the GIOS and went from here to the Catholic center across the street to the Islamic cultural center to the Congregational Church, to the Hillel Student Center to the Methodist Church.

At each place we heard a story about a different environmental refugee somewhere in the world. Could be human, could be other. We heard about the bog copper butterfly and we heard about the retreating glaciers in Glacier National Park. We heard about people in the Sudan who are losing their homes or their lives because of drought.

Jan Flaaten, who was supposed to do this tonight told a story about a Pacific Island of Tuvalu. It went something like this, Kim’s going to help me.

My name is Taleki and I have the best job in the whole wide world. My job is to greet tourists when they come to our airport at Tuvalu. I say to them the first thing, I say, “Look at the tag on your luggage. Because our airport is right outside our capital city of Funafuti, the abbreviation for the tag says FUN”, and all the tourists laugh.

Then I say, “At the end of the runway you can see our mountain, Mount Funafuti. It’s 16 feet above sea level and it was created the last time there was a storm and the waves and the wind created this pile of sand. Our nation is the second smallest nation in the world next to the Vatican. There are only 11,600 people here.”

One of the tourist raised his hands and said, “What was it like the last time the storm came here. How high did the water get?” Then my face was not happy anymore. I said, “Many of our people are leaving the island because of the rising water. My family has moved to Auckland, New Zealand and last night I got a call from my son who says he’s taking his family.” His children are afraid of the rising water.

Somebody else raised their hand and said, “How long will it be before the water totally engulfs your island?” I said, “I don’t know, nobody really knows. It maybe next year, it maybe five years, but I have to stay here because my parents are buried here, my grandparents are buried here. If the island is swallowed by the sea, who will tell our stories?”

[Applause]

Bland: That was one walk that we did together to highlight the effects of climate change. On May 5th, we’re doing another one, 350.org connecting the dots. We’ll be talking about how extreme weather events all over the world are a sign of climate change and we’ll start at the Arizona Corporation Commission, where so many important decisions are made about energy efficiency. Then we’ll go to the capital, to the senate, to the house and someplace else. Each spot we’ll hear stories about extreme weather and climate change and what we might do both as a community of faith and as a larger community to be responsive to that crisis.

Thank you.

[Applause]

McCollow: Thanks, Doug and thanks especially also for reminding us about the fact that even the most tiny of nations matter.

Also sticking with the global theme, we’re going to hear from Nathan and Anamiha 30:17, they are from Sustainable Toluca.

Anamiha: All right, so my name is Anamiha.

Nathan Korkki: I’m Nathan Korkki.

Anamiha: We’re Master Students at the Design School here at ASU. We’re working on the Sustainable Toluca Project for Mexico’s first sustainable town.

This is our team; we’re led by two faculty advisors, John Takamura and Daniel O’Neil from the Sustainability School and the Design School. They’re both part of Global Resolve here at ASU and then there’s six of us. We’re all Masters of Design students with backgrounds in engineering and design and sustainability.

We are partnered with—well we’re part of the design school. We’re partnered with Global Resolve of the College of Technology and Innovation at ASU and we’re also working with Tec de Monterrey in Toluca, Mexico.

This is kind of our process; it’s a five year process. We’re in about a year and a half right now and the main goal of this whole—the main idea behind this process is that we’re designing with the community. Then getting feedback and it’s kind of a reinterring process where we use that feedback to weed through our design.

The town that we’re focusing on is San Antonia Buenavista in Toluca, Mexico. It’s a small town of about 5,000 people mostly living below the poverty line. Earning less than $2 a day and it’s a farming community but we’re finding that people are selling their farms to look for other work and provide for their families.

They have all the assets available, but they are not necessarily sure how to use them. Our goal is to kind of encourage local family run businesses and to help them and alleviate their poverty.

Korkki: The question is right now we’re working on six core projects within this overall network system. One of the projects being an education diagnosis prevention program, there’s many common illnesses that are affecting the community basically because they aren’t educated on what is causing these illnesses.

One of the team members is analyzing—they just built this new clinic but there’s still not the knowledge base within the clinic that’s spreading to the community. She’s looking at how you can turn that into a more effective business model of sorts and create greater access to health care.

Another form of preventive care is what we’re calling this organic yogurt brand. Since it is a farming community and considered disconnected from modern society a lot of the farming technologies that they use are already organic and sustainable. He’s looking at how currently 70 percent of Mexican individuals 16 and older are considered to be obese.

We’re looking at how we can provide healthier alternatives to junk food through this organic yogurt brand. As well as this entire lakeside floating restaurant brand. The issue with this being there are three reservoirs that they’re very proud of that they built, but they have become stagnant because they’re not aerated.

We’re looking at how chinampas, which are an Aztec tradition of floating gardens, what those do is they actually regenerate the aquifers and can introduce oxygen back into the water. We introduce fish and then it closes the loop on a sustainable greenhouse system where in order to turn this into a sustainable business model for the community we’re looking at how we can distribute these goods to the surrounding community, thus creating an organic restaurant brand as well as an organic food brand.

There is also a science lab system that starting at the ground and the base of the community would be the children, which are going to be the future. Using local native indigenous materials, how can we teach science to students without having to bring in outside resources.

Then to tie all of these together we have an e-learning mobile software program that will lay out the basic business educational infrastructure to create growth in the future. Not to be outdone by the one earlier, this is a network diagram that should confuse you. What this is showing is that from these six core projects there’s a whole network of projects that could potentially come from it through economic growth.

Thank you.

[Applause]

McCollow: Thanks Nathan.

One of the things that hopefully you guys will start to see some reoccurring themes in the different and various presentations. One of the things that you noted, Nathan, was the next generation in youth. How one of the things we view in the United States is look at other cultures and see how engaged they are through their food. To keep along with the food theme what we’re going to do is have Chris come up and talk about Chow Locally, which is geared toward the local thing.

Chris Wharton: Thank you, thank you. I actually won’t talk much about Chow Locally till the very, very, very, very end. I’m going to tell you about why Chow Locally exists in the first place.

I wanted to look at a problem each of us participates in individually every single day and because each of us participates in this problem in aggregate it actually becomes a very large problem. Actually the size of a football stadium and I’ll tell you what I mean by that in just a second.

What is this problem? It’s this basically each of us throws about one to two pounds of trash every single day. It doesn’t seem like a whole lot, it’s a plastic bottle here, it’s a used coffee cup there, right? Not a whole lot but if you multiple that out across the year we’re looking at an average of 600 pounds of trash per person per year.

That’s a lot of trash, well let’s focus on just a piece of that, food. Okay and we got a nice preview of this just a bit earlier. Food packaging waste in particular makes up 20 percent, roughly 20 percent of municipal solid waste. The waste that’s going into the landfill. Add to that actual food that’s another 14 percent that’s just being wasted, thrown away, going to the landfill.

That’s really the travesty and why is that the case? This is why, because if you took all the food that we wasted in a single day in the U.S. and brought it all together in one spot it would fill a football stadium, a 90,000 seat football stadium. Not just the football field but all the way up to the nosebleeds. All right that’s an incredible amount of food and an incredible amount of calories. In fact, it’s about 1,400 calories per person per day that goes wasted in the U.S. Two-thirds of your average daily intake of calories, multiply that out across the year, 150 trillion calories of food goes wasted in the U.S. every single year.

That’s terrible. That sucks. Why else does that suck? Well here’s another problem, while we are wasting all this food and all these calories at the same time we’re dealing with significant issues of food insecurity.

Okay, 14.5 percent of U.S. households actually are suffering from food insecurity. That means they don’t necessarily know where they’re next meal comes from. Just to kinda put some numbers to that, one in eight adults this year will receive federal dollars for food assistance, isn’t that incredible in the U.S.? One in four children if that’s not staggering enough, 25 percent of U.S. children, okay in the richest country in the world, will participate in the food assistance program like STAMP or WIC.

These are huge problems we have massive food waste on one side, we have food insecurity issues on the other. How do you deal with something that large? Obviously you need multiple solutions from education to policy and everything in between but let me give you some suggestions from the area of work that I’m involved in and that is local foods.

Now you might be saying to yourself okay this is totally a trend, this is a fad, all the hipsters are going to the farmer’s market, this is not gonna last, right? I would contend that there are multiple reasons why this actually is one of many important solutions and let’s start here.

When you buy local normally more often than not you’re actually buying unprocessed whole foods, usually unpackaged. If you’re buying whole foods first of all that’s healthier because you’re supplanting calories you might otherwise have bought at a grocery store in a processed packaged form, right?

It’s healthier but at the same time you’re buying unpackaged foods. That means less food packaging coming into the household, less food packaging waste going out. Also you’re buying from local farms and from my own research I’ve found when people buy local whole foods they actually subscribe more specialness to that food than the same foods they might have bought from the grocery store.

Probably because they transacted directly with the farmer, they know where the food came from, who grew it, they know where the farm is located in their community. As such it’s more special to them and they work harder not to waste that food. That’s what CSA, Communities to Support Agriculture, participants actually told me. They may waste food less by buying locally.

Thirdly, if you’re supporting sources of healthy food by supporting local farmers you’re keeping farmers on the land. By doing so, you allow for more healthy food to be available for the people who need it the most, low income consumers.

You support those farmers you have more access to healthy food and here’s why, all those millions of Americans who are participating in food assistance programs have multiple mechanisms to use their benefits to buy local foods primarily at farmer’s markets. As you support local farmers, you’re supporting those people who are growing those foods and providing greater access to people who need it the most.

What can you do? You can do a number of things. What I’ve done, this is my area of research but I also started a company called Chow Locally. Which is built and literally designed to support as many farms as possibly locally, and to get as much local food out to consumers of all socioeconomic statuses as possible.

At the same time, you can check this out where you can support local farmers by going to farmers markets, joining CSA’s, getting involved in community gardens. Support local farmers, buy local.

Thank you.

[Applause]

McCollow: Many of you may be wondering what this acronym stands for and all I’m going to do is introduce our next speaker and let you know that he will be talking about dirt.

[Laughter]

Kirby: Thank you and good evening everybody. Dirt is what we’re going to be talking about tonight just for five quick minutes, actually about four and a half minutes now. Anyway the thing about sustainability that really interests me is almost like the ecology of sustainability if you will. In order to change one thing it has a relationship with another thing. As Colin was talking about selling used cars you might want to talk about certain features such as you can save money this or you get a certain benefit from doing something else.

I’m looking at a couple things from the urban design standpoint that in a way are inner connected. Two things that I’m really looking at here, to start to talk about this way of redesigning our landscapes and our streetscapes if you will.

One is that rapid urbanization has increased the nighttime temperature by 12 degrees during the past 50 years. Nighttime temperatures have raised about 12 degrees at night. That means your air conditioners gonna have to work a lot harder, which means you’re using more water which produces electricity and you’re spending more money.

For each degree of temperature you’re going to use about 677 more gallons of water per year for each degree, okay? By the way there’s going to be a pop quiz, so make sure to take notes. Right now we use about 100 million gallons of water per day for electricity, okay that’s a lot of water.

If you look at 12 degrees times 677 gallons, over 8,000 gallons per household per year. I’m going to continue multiplying that, now we’re talking 9 billion gallons of water a year because of the urban heat island effect.

Now for those of you who don’t know the urban heat island effect, essentially we paved over everything with asphalt, the sun beats down in the summertime, it sucks it in like a sponge and then at night it slowly radiates it out. That’s why at night it’s a lot warmer than it used to be.

SRP, they say for every one degree their customers pay somewhere, there’s 610,000 customers not just one, maybe someday it’ll be this high three and a half million dollars per month. That brings up D.U.R.T., it’s an acronym, drainage, utilities, recreation and transportation.

It’s an idea of a landscape, urbanism idea of overlapping these things, bringing these things together. Rather than creating separate spaces here in the valley such as oh this is a detention basin, this is a street, this is a park. If there’s a way we can overlap some of these things. A way to create things that are multifaceted functions.

Part of that is learning from [Inaudible 44:16] now I know there’s this whole story about well they just got up and left one day, I’m not exactly sure how that actually happened. They were here for 14,000 years and quite successfully lived here. Catch this, with no air conditioning.

[Laughter]

Kirby: Okay? 14,000 years with no air conditioning are you kidding me? We started to do some basic studies in my firm and we started saying what if we put the road on a diet. I tend to think of myself as like personal trainer for streets.

[Laughter]

Kirby: Okay, so we started saying what if we started to narrow the street, firm it, mean, lean, what if we use some kind of forest paving on the side. What if we actually put the trees down the center of the parking instead of what we call a tree lawn now if they even plant trees in some of these places.

Let’s tighten these things up a little bit and create shade, create walkability, create places, create something that looks like it should be in Phoenix and not necessarily somewhere else.

Some of the close-ups just show some of these ideas of walkable neighborhoods with shade and cool, comfortable things, right? Ways to—shade is the thing that’s gonna help cool the thing at night so now you don’t have all this asphalt that’s spewing out this radiative heat.

The idea of walkability, so people can get around more. One thing you’re talking about is well can we save money? We can save money on electricity, we can save money, we can save water. Those things, I think those are all good things.

Another thing is urban forestry, this is actually the dog park. I had some students do a study on this last year and we said well we need to really think of urban forestry so if we were to start to plant some trees, some of this could become shaded parking. Watch when you go in a parking lot with a few trees, people are always parking under the trees first than full sun.

What if we did this in a certain pattern that eventually could become redevelopment. That even takes on another life or at least the trees that are planted there could be transplanted at another place. Essentially this idea is looking at how we create even urban drainage down the center of the street and then we start taking some of these steps farther into this whole concept of what if it was actually kind of blurring the lines between what’s the street, what’s not the street, what’s the sidewalk, that type of thing.

How can we create these areas that when you think of recreation it’s not just running in trails but some people like to eat on the sidewalk café’s things like that.

That’s it. Thank you.

[Applause]

McCollow: Thanks Kirby 46:56 and one of the things you were talking about was walkability and I know to some people in the Valley that’s almost a foreign concept. We are going to have our next presentation by Taz, and she is going to talk to you about something that’s pretty interesting.

I wanted to ask a question real quick, how many of you rode public transit to get here tonight? All right, cool. I think one of the things Taz might do is make the rest of you guys jealous.

[Laughter]

McCollow: Everyone welcome Taz.

[Applause]

Taz Loomans: Hi, everybody.

Today I got here by carpooling. I live in Central Phoenix and I live a car light lifestyle currently, which means that I own a car but I don’t use it very much. I generally get around without it, on my bike with light rail or bus. If I need to come to Tempe I either cop a ride with my friends or I took the light rail today.

I’m planning on selling my car probably in the next two weeks, if you’re in the market for a Scion XB 2006 it’s pretty cool, let me know. Oh yeah, come talk to me later.

This is what people usually say when I tell them I’m selling my car and I mean this is people from all walks of life. People who live here in the Valley, I mean this is just some of the stuff I’ve gotten. It can get worse than this.

This to me tells me that not having a car in this city, in this region is kind of impossible. People can’t fathom it because it’s such a natural part of living here because our valley has really been designed for the car. People can’t imagine getting around without a vehicle. Why on earth am I doing this? What am I thinking to get rid of this very covenant mode of transportation that makes life possible here in the Valley, right?

Well I have a few reasons; most of them are actually selfish. Some of it is for the environment but a lot of it is for my own personal benefit as well. First is for my own health, I’ve been car light for about two years now and I’ve been able to give up my gym membership. I get plenty of exercise just getting around. It kills two birds with one stone.

Also wealth, basically I save a ton of money by not driving in gas and in wear and tear. This is from a site I did a webinar with Valley Metro recently and that’s actually very conservative I think, save $745 in one year. I actually paid $1,000 a year just in insurance over the last seven years I’ve paid $7,000 in insurance and I haven’t made one claim against it. That’s a lot of money which I’ll be saving when I don’t own a car. I estimated I probably will save around $1,500 at least in gas a year as well.

The pursuit of happiness, really riding my bike is a lot of fun. It actually makes this city instead of a vast gridded plane of sameness. It actually gives it some texture, some variety, some uniqueness. When you’re out and about when you’re using your senses, when you’re looking at things that you would not normally see.

Making a difference, I own and operate a blog called Blooming Rock and this is not only a personal experiment, but it’s really an experiment I’d like to share with the rest of Valley residents who reacted that way, to say hey it’s possible but we have a lot of challenges.

Hopefully to look at what’s missing and hopefully to advocate for more bicycle infrastructure, more walkability, more development that is multi-modal. It’s really to bring attention to this problem that I’ve decided to walk the talk.

How am I doing it? I just wanted to share some how to’s. What first is, where I live. I chose to live in an area where I’m a five minute walk to the nearest grocery store. I’m an eight minute bike ride to Lux’s Coffee Bar which is where I work from. I’m about probably another eight minute, not another, but an eight minute bike ride to the light rail. This all makes it very feasible for me to not to drive.

I can live a full, happy life without giving anything up by not driving. My mode of choice is the bicycle. I feel that Phoenix is really not a walkable place, yet, but it is very bikeable. Of course I supplement by light rail and bus.

My parents live in Chandler so that I visit them every week or so and I have to supplement my bicycle with a light rail and bus. Also car sharing and zip car is another great option. When you need a car but you don’t need to own a personal car you can use zip car because occasionally you can’t get by without using a car.

It’s possible, it’s hard but it’s possible and I’ll be sharing my adventures in car free Phoenix on my blog. Thanks a lot.

[Applause]

McCollow: Thanks Taz.

For our last speaker of the night, we’ll have Braden come up, but I wanted to take everyone back to our first presentation with Colin. When he was talking about communication of stories and ideas and how you get people to understand what you’re talking about with sustainability, with walkability, with living a car free Phoenix.

I invite Braden up to talk about communication and storytelling.

Braden Kay: Awesome. First of all I would like to say I’m so grateful for this institution. We’re so lucky to have a place like the School of Sustainability, to have us work on solutions and have leadership like Rob Melnick and Sander van der Leeuw to lead all of us in creating sustainability solutions.

I’m going to tell a story about a solution I came up with when I first got here and one that I’ve been working on with a group of people the last several years. First, storytelling from sustainability solutions, I’ve got a few different—what’s going on? Oh I’m not Diane.

Kim: Oh I’m sorry.

Kay: I’ve got a few different things we need to pay attention to. We need to pay attention to—Kim, work with me, next one.

Kim: Oh, OK, all the clickers are here.

Kay: Vision for more sustainability future, creative partnerships to make it happen, evidence to support your actions, involve youth, people and place. Next one.

This is the vision for sustainable development for the future of Phoenix. We need to always be thinking about what our goals are. We need creative partnerships, groups of people that are working on these solutions that come from government business non-profits.

We need evidence to support our actions, so we have research institutions like the one here. We need to involve youth, Darren crushes that, he knows what’s up, and then lastly we need to be thinking about people and places. What motivates us, stories that involve the place where your solution is at and the people that your solution is at.

This was the—now we’ll show the first video that I came up with to protect my home town from trash during the first inauguration of President Obama.

Is it not loading? Play it small if you need to.

Kim: Okay. That’s weird.

Kay: Oop, nope we’re not going to get there now.

The stories we learned from that—oop.

Recording: [Inaudible 55:14] people came together happy to celebrate change, but they left the best behind. Phoenix crews had to work through the night, the roads were still closed the next day there was so much trash. Let’s make sure January 20th, Inauguration Day, isn’t just a pretty picture on TV.

If you’re heading to D.C. for inauguration bring an empty bag with you, make sure to pick up your trash before you leave. As long as you hold a ticket, it won’t be going through security, it’s okay to have them with you. Bring an extra bag, help out the person next to you. Let’s treat America’s front lawn, the national lawn, like it’s our own.

We told Barack we’re ready for change, so let’s prove it on day one, in making this inauguration day litter free. This—

Kay: We ended up getting on CNN, CBS, I was quoted in the Economist, very successful in certain ways but what I learned is we didn’t give you a vision for what a sustainable future was. We just said don’t throw away trash.

We partnered with a few mall advocacy groups but we didn’t have enough partnerships to make it happen. We had no evidence that this was gonna work, we didn’t involve young people, we did do a good job, my associates, termed it bricks, biracials and beats in terms of producing sort of something that made sense for that crowd. Other than that we didn’t learn a lot.

Next.

Kim: It’s finished.

Kay: No, now just play the next video.

Kim: Oh okay.

Kay: The next one is a collaboration that we’ve done with Intel, Roosevelt Grow Community Corporation, Bioscience High School and the School of Sustainability and we’ll watch the video.

Recording: Neighbors in one valley community taking an eyesore and making it their little corner of Phoenix and making it a better place. ABC 15’s Eric English, joining us live from near 6th Street in Garfield in Downtown Phoenix. Eric, the lot where you are it’s really been transformed over the last few months.

Well it really has, Katie, and they’re not done yet. The plan is to turn sunflowers, large sunflowers like these, into fuel. Right now I’m standing in the middle of downtown at the lots about two acres of empty lots that have been transformed, planted with these large sunflowers. Today volunteers came in to begin a harvest and begin the process of turning these sunflowers into that fuel.

It’s harvest time here in the valley, the Valley of the Sunflowers, a great project to have going on here. It’s a happy time for project organizers. Sunflowers make people smile, I mean it’s hard to be in a field of sunflowers and not be happy.

Nestled in the heart of downtown Phoenix it’s two acres of sunflowers, formerly empty lots. It’s a beautification project and much more. It’s an outdoor classroom, part of a partnership between area neighborhood associations, the nearby bioscience school and computer giant, Intel.

We’re growing these sunflower seeds to harvest them, press them into oil, turn them into biodiesel to run a car that the campus, that the bioscience campus is building. These two acres could make that car run for a while.

This will produce somewhere between 150 and 200 gallons of fuel. Volunteers harvest the sunflower heads, then dry them, after a couple of weeks students will comb out the seeds and begin the process to turn these beauties into fuel. A successful first round to a project that’s growing interest in people from across the valley. We’re creating biodiesel, we’re creating community programs. I think Phoenix would be a lot better place if we could do this.

Just to wrap up this project has a vision for what the future of Phoenix could be for energy, for education. It has creative partnerships, we have—but we don’t quite have enough evidence to support our actions. We need to work harder on that. It certainly involves youth and the amazing students of bioscience high school. It’s very much a solution that has to do with the people and place of downtown Phoenix.

As you all go out and create stories and solutions think about these things. Have a great night.

[Applause]

McCollow: Thanks Braden, and as I look at the clock we’re finished just a little bit early. You all have about, I don’t know, 35 seconds to hang around after the event is over. You guys can come up and talk to any of the speakers, you guys can mix and mingle amongst yourselves.

One of the reasons that we have this event tonight is that it’s part of Earth Week and of course Earth Day is later in the month but ASU’s finishing a little early. We have this whole week to celebrate the earth and this is just part of a series of events that we wanted to tell you about a movie screening that we’re having tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. at Valley Art, which is on Mill Avenue, and the movie is called Waste Land. It’s a documentary about waste and what we can do about it.

That’s basically it. We wanted to keep everything quick and fast and interesting and so we wanted to thank you all for coming.

Thanks.

[Applause]

[End of Audio]

The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.