Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2008 > July-August 2008

The U’s chapter of the humanitarian organization is using the prize to explore a way to recycle plastic water sachets that litter the streets and beaches of Haiti, a materially destitute island country in the Caribbean. The sachets, pouches made of high-density plastic, are sold by businesses or distributed by aid organizations for toting purified water. Users typically bite off the corner to open them; since the sachets can’t be resealed and are no longer sterile, people discard them after one use. Municipal trash collection and recycling are nonexistent in Haiti. The student engineers hope to use that plastic to make composting toilets for urban families. If it’s successful, the project could enhance sanitation, reduce pollution, and, eventually, create jobs for Haitians.

According to Nathan Knutson, a second-year master’s student in mechanical engineering, large-scale recycling of plastic in the United States is done with enormous injection-molding machines. “We want to remove the hydraulic press, the sophisticated heating processes . . . and bring this down to something that can be hand operated,” he says.

Inspired repurposing isn’t a new concept in Haiti. Artists have long transformed discarded oil drums into exquisite metal sculptures called fer de coupe, and children make toy cars from film canisters. The EWB students hope to replicate that ingenuity.

The students are investigating the feasibility of melting the plastic with solar-heated oil, using seed oil from the inedible jatropha vine native to Haiti.

“We came into it thinking this was a technology issue,” says Chris Weyandt, a recent graduate in electrical engineering. “The technology is there; it’s an application issue. It’s learning about the people and the culture and . . . how we could successfully implement something like this and have

it accepted by the people.” An assessment trip to Haiti, originally scheduled for summer but postponed in the wake of April food riots, is slated for winter break 2009. —Susan Maas

Reporting for Duty
In what might best be called journalism boot camp, eight University of Minnesota journalism students spent a week in June embedded with soldiers at Camp Ripley, a 53,000-acre training facility operated by the Minnesota National Guard near Little Falls, Minnesota. The program is part of the Humphrey Institute’s Warrior to Citizen Campaign, a statewide effort to support Minnesota’s returning veterans and their families. But the week was intended primarily as training for soldiers and student journalists, and secondarily as a way to support the troops.

“The Camp Ripley experience is really giving the soldiers experience with having journalists with them as they do their work, and providing journalists a real good sense of what it’s like to be in a combat zone,” says Dennis Donovan, a research fellow at the Humphrey Institute and the lead organizer of the Warrior to Citizen Campaign. “As for the students, they’re not going to get that experience in the classroom.”

Lt. Col. Kevin Olson, an Iraq war veteran and director of public affairs for the Minnesota National Guard, says that he’s not aware of this model being used in other states. “We hope that we can create a model that can be useful for both future military units in training and also future journalism students,” he says.

Each of the journalism students, a mix of print and broadcast majors, were expected to develop and produce daily stories. Before heading to the camp, Kevin Keen, a senior broadcast journalism student from Wausau, Wisconsin, said he was eager to learn what it’s like to produce television news stories in difficult circumstances. “We’ll spend most of our time with the soldiers and we’ll get to know them. And at night, when the troops are resting, that’s when we’re scheduled to get to work,” he says.

“The biggest thing I’m excited about is having these deadlines every day, really being expected to produce something every day,” says Megan Kadrmas, a print journalism student from Stillwater.

While acknowledging that they’d be helping train soldiers, Keen and Kadrmas were confident they’d be able to maintain journalistic objectivity. Kadrmas said one of her professors advised her to be sure to “maintain a critical eye.” “Hopefully, this experience will make them better journalists and also better citizens,” says Donovan. —Mark Engebretson

Heir Apparel
Designer gowns and shoes belonging to journalist Lally Weymouth debuted at the annual Goldstein Museum of Design Garden Party in May. Weymouth, the senior editor of Newsweek and an heir to the Washington Post fortune, donated to the Goldstein 36 gowns and 4 pairs of shoes that carry designer names such as Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent, James Galanos, Halston, and Emmanuel Ungaro. The Goldstein, which is housed in the College of Design, has more than 18,000 costume objects from designers such as Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Missoni, and Versace. The collection is available to College of Design students to study for technique and inspiration. Weymouth is the daughter of the late Katharine Graham and Philip Graham, both of whom were publishers of the Washington Post. Her brother, Donald Graham, and daughter, Katharine Weymouth, are the Washington Post Company’s current chief executive officer and publisher, respectively.

U Earns a “B”
The U earned a B on the College Sustainability Report Card for its efforts to achieve a sustainable campus in 2007, putting it in the top one-third of the 200 schools graded. The report card was issued by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a nonprofit organization engaged in research and education to advance sustainability in campus operations. Schools and universities with the 200 largest endowments in the United States and Canada were assessed on policies and practices in eight areas: administration, climate change and energy, food and recycling, green building, transportation, endowment transparency, investment priorities, and shareholder engagement. The U received A’s in food and recycling, transportation, and shareholder engagement, while the lowest grades—C’s— were in administration, endowment transparency, and investment priorities. Last year, the first year that the report card was issued, the U received a B- overall.

OVERHEARD ON CAMPUS
“Sex isn’t controversial because some people don’t believe in it; the problem is that sex is a strong driving force in people’s behavior, so people fear it. And the reason sex is a powerful drive lies in our evolutionary past.”
—Olivia Judson, responding to a question about whether sex or evolution is a more controversial topic in the United States. Judson, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London, was the keynote speaker in June at the world’s largest annual conference on evolution, hosted at the University of Minnesota.