Overall Rating	Gold - expired
Overall Score	69.73
Liaison	Lindsey Lyons
Submission Date	April 30, 2012
Executive Letter	Download

STARS v1.2

Dickinson College
IN-2: Innovation 2

Status	Score	Responsible Party
	1.00 / 1.00	Daniel Webster Sustainability Projects Coordinator Center for Sustainability Education

"---" indicates that no data was submitted for this field

A brief description of the innovative policy, practice, program, or outcome:

The Peddler is Dickinson College’s bike-powered coffee cart, which sells organic, fair-trade coffee across campus. The concept was borne and approved by the Idea Fund, a monetary and incubation organization that supports student-innovators who design projects to enhance the social and environmental atmosphere of Dickinson College.

The actual cart was designed, fabricated, and built by students in the Winter of 2011 and debuted this spring. Socially, this project is a healthy sign of entrepreneurship as it weekly attracts a community of volunteers and coffee and tea-drinkers. Economically, this initiative paid back its loan within the first few months of operation—a stunning achievement of solvency and value. And environmentally, the managers only allow reusable cups at the station, and, additionally, they procure coffee from Burlap and Bean—a small roasting house about one hundred miles away that sells only Fair Trade Coffee beans.

The Idea Fund’s ingenuity in incubating, designing, and finishing this project is clearly a sign that innovation is a growing trend and alive and well at Dickinson College.

Date Revised: June 6, 2012

Dickinson College requested that AASHE Staff correct a mistake in this reporting field for the reason specified below.

Previous Value: The Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (ALLARM) is a project of the Environmental Studies Department at Dickinson College. Since its founding in 1986, ALLARM has become a nationally recognized technical and programmatic support center for community organizations interested in watershed assessment, protection, and restoration. Through the work of professional and student staff, ALLARM offers comprehensive services to enable groups to use critical scientific tools to enhance environmental quality and fully participate in community decision-making. For 25 years, ALLARM has successfully trained and engaged volunteer monitors to investigate and answer questions about the myriad of issues facing our state’s water quality. ALLARM’s philosophy is centered around bottom-up engagement, capacity building – by involving Pennsylvania communities in every step of the scientific process, including defining the research agenda, designing the study, collecting and analyzing data, managing and interpreting the data, and bringing the data to the public for action. When faced with the severity of natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale combined with budget shortages at the Department of Environmental Protection, ALLARM developed a Marcellus Shale volunteer monitoring protocol to insure that Pennsylvania streams are aptly monitored and protected. The recent growth of activity to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale gas play is taking place in backyards, fields, and beneath homes in our communities. Involving volunteer monitors in documenting impacts from gas extraction is a cost-effective way to collect data over a wide geographic area. Residents can easily gain access to private property in their neighborhoods and can sample frequently. In response to this need, ALLARM spent the first seven months in 2010 developing a scientifically robust protocol that allows residents to monitor small streams on a weekly basis for the purpose of early detection and prevention of stream contamination from Marcellus Shale gas extraction. The protocol calls for a period of baseline monitoring prior to gas well development, followed by “watchdog” monitoring during the gas extraction activities. On a weekly basis, volunteers collect flow, visual assessment, total dissolved solids (TDS), and conductivity data. Volunteers also send low flow and high flow samples to ALLARM for quality assurance and quality control (to verify they are using their equipment correctly). Volunteers are encouraged to send low and high flow samples to certified laboratories for baseline analysis for signature chemicals, barium and strontium. If volunteers have elevated TDS and conductivity readings they will send samples to a certified lab for barium and strontium analysis to determine if flowback water is the source of elevated levels. If those signature chemicals are also elevated, the event is reportable. The development of the protocol has involved extensive laboratory work and field testing. The manual ALLARM developed, entitled Marcellus Shale Gas Extraction: A study design and protocol for volunteer monitoring, is available to the public.

Explanation: This isn't a correction, rather an update to our Innovation Credit section. When ready, I have pdf letters prepared to attach to our report.

A letter of affirmation from an individual with relevant expertise:

Innovation Credit 2 The Peddler.pdf

The website URL where information about the innovation is available:

http://blogs.dickinson.edu/ideafund/projects-3/completed/the-coffee-peddler/

Date Revised: Feb. 5, 2013

Data source(s) and notes about the submission:

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STARS v1.2

Dickinson College IN-2: Innovation 2

Dickinson College
IN-2: Innovation 2