Coffee the hot topic for Guild hopeful

In the second part of our series on student guild candidates, Aiman Aminudin meets an engineering student with big plans for recycling Coffee is high on the menu for student guild candidate Brice Gower. But it’s not the price of coffee that is on the table – rather the waste Murdoch students and staff create from consuming it. Mr Gower is pushing for a more sustainable university environment, beginning with a more effective method of dealing with waste from coffee consumption. “The coffee we buy, as well as anything we buy, needs to be not only sustainable, but responsible,” he says. Mr Gower wants to ensure that all products local vendors use are certified Fair Trade. His campaign will also deal with the disposal of cups and wasted coffee grounds, with a keep-your-cup policy in which vendors reuse the cups used to serve customers. If elected, he promise a composting policy will also be introduced to the vendors as a means of disposing used coffee grounds responsibly. But that’s not all: a recycling plant will also be considered for the campus. Mr Gower, a final-year engineering student, is completing a double major of instrumentation and control engineering as well as industrial computer systems engineering. “I have the computational knowledge to design systems that can actually take care of these goals,” he says. “A plastic recycling plant is very intensive on motors, controllers and power consumption,” he says, “Not something a typical greeny is aware of and I’m quite uniquely poised in doing that.” Tapping into coffee is one way to gain the attention of students fixating on a daily caffeine boost and Mr Bower believes he can make his mark through less waste and more awareness of campus sustainability.