Hello!

    My name is Sierra Ellison-Swabey and I am an intern working in the Procurement Services Department for the 2013-2014 school year. My internship is through the Provost’s Sustainability Internship (PSI) Program, which “is a year-long combination course/internship that helps students develop competencies necessary to become effective environmental professionals and leaders. Students are paired with staff or faculty mentors and work closely with them on campus sustainability projects and research that helps the campus reach its sustainability goals” (Office of Sustainability). It is a great program, which offers faculty and staff the opportunity to employ student workers to complete important sustainability projects for which they may not ordinarily have the resources.

    My project was to create a green office supplies catalog in CruzBuy. The purpose was to create a user friendly way to find and purchase environmentally preferred products (EPP) in CruzBuy. My project entailed using past purchasing data to find the top 100 most purchased office supplies from UCSC's two key distributors of office supplies. I identified and sorted these products into separate categories of EPP and non-EPP products. Additionally, I went on to verify the green claims and categorize the EPP office supplies by their post-consumer waste (PCW) content. This catalog was created to help the Green Purchasing Working Group (representing Procurement Services) reach their 2013-2016 Campus Sustainability Plan goal to increase EPP office supply purchases by 150% from fiscal year end 2012.

    The finished project is located in the CruzBuy favorites section under a “shared” folder. This “shared” folder houses two lists of folders that separate the products into categories based on project description and distributor. In each category the products are separated into “Best” and “Good” folders, which divide the products based on the amount of Post-Consumer Waste (PCW) found in each product. PCW is made from waste taken out of the waste stream, and reduces the amount of trash to the landfill.

    The “Best” folder contains products that have PCW between 75%-100%, and the “Good” folder contains products with less than 75% PCW. These descriptions can be found under the folder’s name located at the very top of the page.

    My hope is that this project will help the Green Purchasing Working Group reach their goal in the Campus Sustainability Plan and that it will inspire sustainable purchases in everyday life. Thank you so much for your time, and I hope my project is helpful to you!

Sincerely,
Sierra Ellison-Swabey
PSI Intern 2013-2014
Green Purchasing Working Group Intern