UA News

The Arizona Solar Racing Team will showcase one of its vehicles at The Sustainability and Energy EXP09 and the UA has a number of sustainability events planned.

A solar car built by University of Arizona students will be on display during a sustainability expo that is featuring cars and trucks manufactured by the likes of Chevy, Ford and Volkswagen that have been converted into fuel-efficient vehicles.

The Arizona Solar Racing Team's car will be on display at the Tucson Convention Center, 260 S. Church Ave.

The event, the "Sustainability and Energy EXP09: Building a Better Community," brings together regional and national energy experts.

Hosted by the Pima Association of Governments, the event will be held from 3-7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. The expo will also include a film festival, speaker series and keynote address from Chris Paine, who directed the film "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

At the expo, the car designed and built by UA students will be among 15 alternative-fuel vehicles on display, making this the team's second time showing at the expo.

Last year, the team completed a 2,400-mile race in the 2008 America Solar Challenge.

For that competition, which began in Texas and ended in Alberta, Canada, the UA team raced its "Monsoon." The car was on display at the 2007 expo, and has since been upgraded.

In addition to participating in the Expo, the UA has numerous sustainability-related events underway and planned.

The UA is in the midst of a 10-week national recycling competition called RecycleMania. The UA community has already collected more than 500,000 pounds of recyclable material for the competition, which ends next month.

On March 25, the UA Well University Partnership will host a lecture by Gary P. Nabhan, a UA research social scientist and co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH.

Nabhan's lecture, "Flavors without Borders: Desert Foods, Regional Food Security and Health," is part of the2009 Well U Provost Lecture Series. The event will be held at noon at Gallagher Theater, which is located in the Student Union Memorial Center, 1303 E. University Blvd.

On April 2, Glenn Schrader, who heads the UA chemical and environmental engineering department, will give a seminar on "Environmental Sustainability for Energy, Infrastructures and Manufacturing." The 4 p.m. lecture will be held in the lecture hall in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Building, 1130 N. Mountain Ave.

And, currently, the Arizona Solar Racing Team is gearing up for the Shell Eco-Marathon, which requires that teams of students across the nation design and build energy-efficient vehicles. Competitors have had to drive upwards from 1,800 miles on one litre of gas.