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For 17-year-old twins Elise and Emily Kuwaye, the fun comes from not knowing what might emerge from their experiments in the laboratory at Kapiolani Community College. Read more

For 17-year-old twins Elise and Emily Kuwaye, the fun comes from not knowing what might emerge from their experiments in the laboratory at Kapiolani Community College.

“In high school labs, it’s interesting, but basically you’re given a set of procedures and you kind of know how it ends already,” Emily said. “But this is, you know, real-life application of the skills and it’s actually making an impact on the world. It’s not something you just do in a lab and it just ends in a lab.”

The sisters’ efforts are just one link in a chain of projects by chemistry, culinary and economics students at KCC to complete a sustainability loop on the Diamond Head campus that is already reducing waste and their carbon footprint, and has earned a University of Hawaii 2018 President’s Green Initiative Award of $10,000.

The sustainability story at KCC starts outside the cafeteria, where a BioPro generator gobbles up used cooking oil salvaged from the kitchen and turns it into biodiesel. Nearby stands a huge Earth Tub that transforms kitchen scraps into compost that goes directly into an organic garden that provides herbs and produce for the cafeteria.

The latest step in the sustainability quest is to figure out uses for a byproduct of the biodiesel-making process: a brownish glycerin that normally would go to waste. In the works are candles, soap, fertilizer, a degreaser and Hawaiian salves. The students also plan to use solar power by day and biodiesel at night to run a pump to circulate water in a hydroponics system in the garden.

Chemistry student Victoria Hallett, who earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing and worked in that field before deciding to pursue science, said it’s literally trial-and-error as the students dream up experiments.

“Most of the time it’s negative results,” Hallett said with a smile. “That’s what science is, and that’s fine. You learn a lot from your failures.”

She and her classmates are working on clarifying the glycerin and adjusting recipes for candles and soap to make sure they set right and smell good. For scents, they are trying natural, readily available items, such as orange peels, that would normally end up in the compost bin.

After learning how to create biodiesel from used cooking oil, they also managed to recover methanol from the glycerin on a small scale, under the guidance of assistant professor Kathleen Ogata in their chemistry research course. The class includes the Kuwaye twins, who are seniors at Kaimuki Christian School, and 17-year-old Celeste Guiles, a precocious homeschooled student who also started studying at KCC while in high school.

Ron Takahashi, professor of culinary arts at Kapiolani, has long been committed to a sustainable food service. With grant funding, he brought composting and the biodiesel generator to the campus years ago, and he’s still coming up with visionary ideas.

“I’m asking them to try making sunscreen,” Takahashi said. “A locally produced sunscreen I think has a lot of potential to use the glycerin and would have a very high demand. It’s highly marketable.

“It’s a very good chance to do scientific experiments that can lead to value-added products.”

Economics students, led by instructor Jaclyn Lindo, are making soap, analyzing costs and marketing, and will develop a website to tell the sustainability story. UH-Manoa instructor Keoki Baclayon is willing to develop recipes for Hawaiian healing salves, Ogata said.

“We are thankful that we got the UH Presidential Green Initiative Award,” Ogata said. “It allows our KCC students to work on real-world problems of energy, recycling, sustainability and entrepreneurship.”

“Everybody is doing their thing, each group of students is excited about their part,” she added. “We are hoping this will become a model system for industry or other campuses.”