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.

Someday you will die... but not today!

The other day I took a walk through the Vanier Pavilion with some friends. Very soon the building is going to undergo a major renovation and it is going to be almost completely gutted and renewed. So that means that the building has to be completely emptied of its contents. And so when I was touring the building and beginning to make a preliminary assessment of the remaining contents, I was a little shocked to see that there was still a plant left in the building.

Now this is going to be a tad dramatic but when I saw the plant from the other side of the locked door I immediately lunged for it. The door was of course locked and I ended up looking kind of foolish. Whatever, at the very least it really upped my greed cred. And then 2 days later I went back and got the plant (things tend to work better when you bring the right set of keys).

So this isn’t the first time that either myself or Brigitte has saved plants from abandonment. Vanier is the second building that is going to be revamped or demolished this year, and even though I could go on and on about what the stuff that gets left inside buildings (I will save that for another post), I want to focus on plants. I find it strange that people would abandon a plant. I mean it is a living thing and given the size of some of these plants, there was a lot of time and attention that was put into it.

So why am I all worked up about these plants? Well I have been playing around with the idea of flooding the campus with more indoor plants for a couple of years now. I mean there are a lot of reasons why we should all have more indoor plants. They improve air quality, they improve moral, they are aesthetically pleasing, and they help us to reconnect (albeit in a small way) to the natural world for which we are so lacking. But mostly for me, I just think they look really cool.

An appropriate metric would be the number of indoor plants per employee. I think fixing a number of three to five plants per employee would be ideal. Having a program in place to give new employees some plants would be a nice idea. There are of course logistical problems but I think that the benefits outweigh the costs. The plants could be used as a means to make the office space more personal. When employees go on vacation they will have to depend on their office mates to take care of their plants, creating a stronger sense of community.

Other plants saved in the past month >>

The Big Dust-Off

I have already professed my hatred for litter. I think that it is really the pinnacle of laziness. Let me explain where I am coming from. What I do in my room is my business. If I mess up the kitchen, you know leave a few dishes in the sink or neglect to wipe-down the counter, then that is rude and insensitive to my roommate. The house isn’t just mine. Now if I leave my front lawn in disarray then I am being slothful and disrespectful to my neighbours and their property value. My actions have an impact on others

So when some one tosses something on the ground (litters), I see it as one of the most selfish acts possible. You are basically robbing society of its right to a clean environment and depriving the public of beauty. A sprinkling of cigarette butts, a dash of disposable coffee cups, and of course a smidgen of candy wrappers, and you’ve got yourself the fixins’ for one ugly landscape. In fact the only missing element is the cliché free daily newspaper blowing around by like urban tumbleweed.

I always think to myself that the city could be a much better place if only people could do a little bit of house cleaning every once and a while. I mean it would be even better if we could avoid callously tossing things on the ground but... city dwellers will be city dwellers. And, much to my chagrin, even a place as beautiful as a university campus is not impervious to litter. Sometimes the litter seems to pour over the campus like a wave.

Your average campus is no different from anywhere else. Smashed beer bottles are the carefree testament to a night of on-campus drinking. Black polka dotted banana peels perched beside waste receptacles are the shameful reminders of an attempted long-distance waste shot. And somehow there is always a mountain of gravelly debris, likely the ruminants of a slippery winter. I can’t help but look at all this stuff and think “Really? Can’t we do just a little bit better?”

Well next week we will get our chance to slightly right the wrongs of a wasted landscape (sorry about the terrible pun). You see next week is Spring Cleaning for the City of Ottawa. The entire city is going to come together and give this city a good brush up. This is the first year that the campus is going to participate and I am hoping that it won’t be the last. But there is something more to this than just a campus cleaning. To me there is something holistic about the coming together of a group of people with a shared purpose.

The contrast in my mind is night and day. I was strolling through the campus today and I saw something that put me off a little. The campus was full of workers cleaning up for the Spring. It’s not the fact that people were cleaning up ahead of big clean-up date, it’s more how it was being down. The campus has a contract with a big company that comes in and does an industrial style clean-up. The whole thing was rather disturbing to see because of the soullessness of it. What I saw was a group of people blowing the dust off of the sidewalks with giant diesel powered blowers, each with an industrialized mask. It was kind of apocalyptic considering that next week there should be a group of people working hand in hand with simple brooms, gloves, and hopefully smiles.

So if you feel the urge to get your hands dirty, do a little something nice for mother nature, and exercise that good citizen muscle of yours, then sop by the campus on Saturday April 25th and we will have all the tools ready for you.

And the Winners are….

So it is that time of the year again. The weather is starting to get a little more tolerable, there are green shoots on some of the bushes and trees, and the GOOD IDEAS contest winners have been announced. “What’s the Good Ideas contest?” you are asking yourself. No don’t strain your mind, I will tell you instead.

The Good Ideas contest is a competition for students on campus to suggest good ideas that the University should adopt. It began in 2008 with 10 prizes of $1,000 for the best ideas, as judged by a panel of campus community members. This year it is grown to 20 top prizes of $1,000.

The contest was mildly ridiculed by some students because of the contest’s ironic tagline “Only one good idea per student”, implying that students were only capable of having one good idea at a time (we certainly wouldn’t want their brains to over heat).

But controversy aside (and I use the word controversy very loosely), I heart this competition. It essentially provides me with an unlimited source of great ideas to make the campus more sustainable. I had hoped that the contest would be changed into a green ideas contest but I think that I’ll survive. Especially since a good number of the ideas are already green.

This year’s winners are no exception, so let’s take a look at the one’s that have caught my interest in particular.
· Make downloadable agendas available
· Création d'un vestiaire (a drop-off place for old objects that could be used by other students)
· Creation of bike lanes
· Improving nutrition: Opening a grocery store on campus and a buffet section in the cafeteria
· Regular "town-hall" style meetings
· Classified used-book website
· Plant trees on the roofs
· La création d'un centre d'éducation financière
· Campus computer repairs
· Clinique de santé mentale

Admittedly there are other ideas that could also be considered as sustainable in the list of winners. And I can’t imagine how many of the submissions were related to sustainability. Basically 50%-75% of the winners were sustainable ones so…. here’s to a brave green world. And now comes the hard part, making all these ideas a reality.

For a complete list of the winners, click here.