North Campus Garden
The north campus co-op has by far the largest garden in the ICC. However, it's been in complete disrepair for years. Since 2010, we been working on rehabilitating the garden back to the state of its once great past.
Using compost from the Ann Arbor Recycle Center, we've set up a single raised bed. We've also started working on repairing the fence to keep out the gophers. In 2011, we hope to build four more raised beds and finish repair work on the fence.
New Water Fixtures
In 2010, the sustainability team received a grant of $2000
from the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation. This money was to go to purchasing more efficient water fixtures. Since then, we've almost completely replaced all shower heads with aerated, low-flow shower heads (1.7 gpm vs 2.5 gpm). In addition, we've started replacing faucets with new aerated faucets (1 gpm vs 2 gpm).
It's only been about a year, but the results are already quite promising. We did a water usage comparison of the entire month of January in 2009 and 2011 across all ICC co-ops. We found that on average, the ICC was using 3.82 fewer gallons per-person per-day. The savings totalled to about $440 and 57,700 gallons of water for the whole ICC that month.
Improving Insulation
Many of the ICC houses are still lacking in sufficient insulation that can help drive down energy costs during the winter. As part of the initiative to re-insulate the ICC, we have begun weather-stripping all exterior doors and next year we will replace some of the windows in Truth house. We've also applied for a grant from the Downtown Development Authority (DDA). This money would go towards new insulation in the ICC main office.
More Efficient Lighting
The ICC has long since replaced our incandescent bulbs with energy-saving compact fluorescents. Now we're working on replacing the older T12 fluorescent tube lighting with newer T5 bulbs which are 40% more efficient. In addition, we'll be installing motion sensor switches in areas like hallways and kitchens.
Powering the ICC with Solar
One of our future projects will be to install solar solar water heaters on ICC houses. From a past analysis, we found that this would be most economically feasible at Truth, O'Keefe and Renaissance. Things that still need to be worked out are securing funding and logistics of installation.
