Recycle-mania Results 2009
A couple of months ago I blogged about how uOttawa was going to be involved in Recycle-mania. I was pretty stoked about the idea because I knew that the university was pretty good but I didn’t really have any proof so I was really happy that Brigitte signed us up.
I don’t want to sound like I was a worry wart but when you don’t have a point of reference things can seem a little tangled. Imagine my surprise when Brigitte gave me the news. We were 47th in the overall competition. Not bad I thought to myself, not bad at all. I mean when you think about it, this was the first time that we ever entered into the competition, we don’t have any composting, and Brigitte, our waste diversion coordinator, hasn’t even been in her post for 1 full year yet.
Now imagine my surprise when Brigitte told me that the organizers had recalculated our results and we had in fact finished 14th overall, not 47th. I was ecstatic! I mean holy crap; we almost broke the top 10 in our first year. And the part that really got me happy, we scored 12th for reduction in consumption and... (drum role please) we are number 1 in Canada!
So a couple of live installations, a few movie nights, several waste audits, and a whole bunch of volunteers later and we came out on top. I want to believe that there was a build up to this event. Recently there have been a couple of changes to the recycling system on campus. The university hired a waste diversion coordinator, upgraded all the recycling counters, installed more bins, and started giving awareness training to campus community members.
But I am going to forgo all that and give the thanks to where it belongs, with Brigitte. When people take the time to commit to something that is bigger than them, amazing things can happen. In this case a campus was able to come together and prove that anything is possible.
I don’t want to sound like I was a worry wart but when you don’t have a point of reference things can seem a little tangled. Imagine my surprise when Brigitte gave me the news. We were 47th in the overall competition. Not bad I thought to myself, not bad at all. I mean when you think about it, this was the first time that we ever entered into the competition, we don’t have any composting, and Brigitte, our waste diversion coordinator, hasn’t even been in her post for 1 full year yet.
Now imagine my surprise when Brigitte told me that the organizers had recalculated our results and we had in fact finished 14th overall, not 47th. I was ecstatic! I mean holy crap; we almost broke the top 10 in our first year. And the part that really got me happy, we scored 12th for reduction in consumption and... (drum role please) we are number 1 in Canada!
So a couple of live installations, a few movie nights, several waste audits, and a whole bunch of volunteers later and we came out on top. I want to believe that there was a build up to this event. Recently there have been a couple of changes to the recycling system on campus. The university hired a waste diversion coordinator, upgraded all the recycling counters, installed more bins, and started giving awareness training to campus community members.
But I am going to forgo all that and give the thanks to where it belongs, with Brigitte. When people take the time to commit to something that is bigger than them, amazing things can happen. In this case a campus was able to come together and prove that anything is possible.
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