Rooting For The Green Team

Colleges aren't just going head to head on the gridiron and basketball court any more. Now, the big rivalry may be in garbage.

In late January, more than 400 institutions across the U.S. kicked off a 10-week competition--RecycleMania--to see which of them is the best at recycling and which is doing the most to cut the waste produced on campus. Students tally up the results each week and post them to RecycleMania's Web site for a bit of bragging rights.

RecycleMania is about half over and the scoreboard leader is Kalamazoo College, in Kalamazoo, Mich., which is first in a combined ranking of source reduction and recycling. North Lake College, a community college in Irving, Texas, is tops currently in waste minimization, while the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has recycled the highest gross tonnage of materials so far. There are four additional challenges in recycling by source material. Medical University of South Carolina is the leader in paper, United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., is shipping out the most corrugated cardboard, Rhode Island School of Design is tops in bottles and cans, and Mills College, a school for women only in Oakland, Calif., is socking away the most food service organics.

Updated results are posted every Friday, and you can check them here.

Maryland Gangs Up On Climate Change

How many colleges does it take to change a light bulb?

The University System of Maryland has decided that the magic number should be all 13 of its universities and research centers, and that they will not only change their light bulbs, but a bit of the world too.

USM Chancellor William E. Kirwan (pictured) recently launched a sustainability and climate change initiative aimed at sharply cutting his schools' energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, developing green building guidelines for new construction and major renovations, strengthening academic and research programs on the environment, and improving the environment of Maryland. Each of USM's schools--which range from the many campuses of the University of Maryland to Towson University--will be building out its own sustainability program and initiatives.

Kirwin named Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, to be USM's vice chancellor of environmental sustainability. USM has already set up a Web page on its sustainability initiative. You can get more information on its many green undergraduate and graduate degrees here .

Image credit: The University System of Maryland

A Video Game For The Environment

Can video games save the planet? Maybe, if they are in the hands of the right high school students.

The Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley was just awarded $238,000 for its work on an alternative reality game that stars … the environment. The game, called "Black Cloud", lets teams of high school students use data from real air quality sensors to act the part of real estate developers or environmentalists. The students, who are in high schools in Los Angeles and Cairo, must balance sites for development with sites for conservation.

Berkeley's work was recognized by HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), in partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. But "Black Cloud" had a lot of competition: Judges sorted through more than 1,000 applications to name seven winning projects, which also included another environmentally themed entry. The Sustainable South Bronx Fab Lab, in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won $100,000 for a system that lets users turn digital models into real world constructions.

You can learn more about the HASTAC competition here.

Image, credit: Black Cloud development screenshot, The Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley