SLAC Today is available online at:
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In this issue:
Trash Audit Yields Gems
SLAC Engineer Shows where Art Meets Science
Public Talk Today in Palo Alto: First Six Months of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

SLAC Today

Thursday - March 26, 2009

Trash Audit Yields Gems

(Photo - volunteers sort trash for the trash audit)
Volunteers sort recyclable and compostable materials from more than 200 pounds of trash. (Photo courtesy of Micki DeCamara. Click for larger image.)

To help identify opportunities for improvement and to serve as a baseline for the goal of increasing recycling by 5 percent this year, volunteers from various departments at SLAC participated in a waste audit last November. The group sorted more than two hundred pounds of trash from one of the lab's office buildings, equivalent to a 1- to 2-day accumulation.

(Image - pie chart of waste content)
Waste breakdown from the trash audit. (Image courtesy of Micki DeCamara. Click for larger image.)

The waste breakdown (left) showed that 33 percent of the waste—including paper, cardboard, and cans & bottles—could have been recycled through our existing program. Twenty-one percent of the waste was composed of food or organic compostable food serviceware. SLAC's compost program is currently available only at the cafeteria, but this data can be used to support the business case for a potential site-wide compost program. The final and perhaps most striking observation of the waste audit was the mass of paper towel waste. Paper towels made up 22 percent of the trash being sorted. Modernizing our buildings with more sustainable infrastructure through projects like the Science Laboratories Infrastructure program will help the lab reduce this waste stream.

Please help reduce the percentage of recyclable materials in the trash. Green recycling containers for cans, bottles and mixed paper recycling are located throughout the SLAC campus. If additional green recycling containers are needed in your area, please alert your building manager.

To receive a free desktop recycling tray, e-mail a request to Micki DeCamara and provide your building and room number. For more information, including locations of cardboard recycling bins and other program contacts, please see SLAC's recycling Web site.

This is the third in a series of articles this year to promote waste reduction and recycling. See also: "Recyclemania" and "Free Desktop Recycling Trays."

(Photo - the ATLAS detector at CERN)
The ATLAS detector. (Photo courtesy of Dan Van Winkle. Click for larger image.)

SLAC Engineer Shows where Art Meets Science

SLAC electrical engineer Dan Van Winkle has an eye for beautiful landscapes. His photos have garnered local and regional awards. Now, his shot of a manmade but no less spectacular landscape has overcome competition to appear in a juried art gallery show, "The Consilience of Art & Science."

Van Winkle created his entry during a recent trip to CERN, where he works on the radio-frequency feedback systems that keep protons circulating around the Large Hadron Collider.

"I took a tour with Charlie Young," who co-leads the SLAC team contributing to the LHC's ATLAS experiment, Van Winkle said. "I always take my camera with me. So I took pictures, and this one just happened to be pretty good."

For this show, the Pence Gallery in Davis put out a call for pieces that explore an intersection of visual art and science. "I sent a few [entries]," Van Winkle said. "I had some of LCLS quadrupole and undulator magnets—but they liked the ATLAS shot." The selected entries, from ceramic sculptures to photographs, are on display at the gallery through April 12.

Public Talk Today in Palo Alto: First Six Months of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

From 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. today, astrophysicist Peter Michelson will present "The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope: The First 6 Months" at the Lockheed Martin campus in Palo Alto. Michelson is principal investigator of the Large Area Telescope onboard FGST, and a member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at SLAC. His presentation is part of the Lockheed Martin Palo Alto Colloquium series, and is open to the public. For details and directions to the talk, see the event Web site.

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