Introduction

College campuses across the country are making efforts to move towards a more sustainable, environmentally conscious approach to campus activities. This can be seen in the increased implementation of solar and wind power, recycling efforts and an emphasis on slowing climate change. The Lafayette College community, in a similar sense, also expresses this desire to prioritize environmental sustainability on campus.

Source: http://garden.lafayette.edu/

Source: Lafayette LaFarm

Within Lafayette’s sustainability initiative, LaFarm, the college’s local farm, is the cornerstone of the Lafayette College Sustainable Food Loop. The campus Sustainability Food Loop aims to close the loop that includes food production, consumption and food waste. This is of growing importance on college campus’ seeing how industrialized and and disconnected the food production process has become in recent years. LaFarm and Lafayette College aim to integrate curriculum and practice with regards to sustainable food production and consumption for the campus community and Easton community.

In order for LaFarm to achieve their goal of providing local produce for Lafayette College as well as serving as an educational tool for students and local farmers, improvements to their facilities must be made. Our capstone project this year is to examine how a solar powered wash station can be implemented into LaFarm. The solar powered wash station is a crucial component of LaFarm’s daily activities and must be implemented properly in order for LaFarm to maintain and expand upon their current operations. Our research question can be articulated as follows: how can a solar powered wash station be implemented so as to ensure LaFarm’s sustainable future while strengthening its relationship with Lafayette College as well as the Easton and Forks communities?

The goal of designing and implementing a solar powered wash station is that it will comply with the recent Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The FSMA legislation requires farm and facilities to maintain safe food processes. Though LaFarm is currently exempt from this legislation, LaFarm’s compliance will showcase its credibility in the small scale farming community. To further frame LaFarm as an educational template for community farms, LaFarm wants to finance the project without the help of donations from local farms.

Potential difficulties we may face in the design and implementation of a solar powered wash station will primarily be with compliance with new FSMA legislation. Other challenges we may face in the design of the wash station will be determining the model and capacity of the necessary UV filter and battery.

In order to implement and design a solar powered wash station at LaFarm, we must first consider many other factors including contexts such as social, policy, economic and technical. In the following analysis of what this installation should look like, our group has analyzed all components of the wash station at LaFarm and how it will effect the community and campus. At the conclusion of our analysis, we hope to have presented a well researched and articulated study of how a solar powered wash station should be designed and implemented to best fit the needs of LaFarm.