Building a Better Bin part III

My boss always tells me that the secret to success is to surround yourself with the best people and let them do their thing. This makes sense after all; no one can do everything by themselves. The matter at hand was recycling and building a recycling dream team was less intuitive than one might think. I mean who are the right people to use if you want to complete reform the recycling system on campus? As this little story about building better bins continues I feel it is important to talk about the people that made these bins a reality.

Let me tell you that a lot of ideas floated through my mind. I started with hardcore environmentalists but… recycling is a shared common activity so it had to be a colloquial activity. I thought about getting an outside consultant group but… the problems on our campus are unique to our campus and we needed ‘local solutions’. I even thought about getting some business people (who else to take a cold shrill look at recycling on campus and figure out how best to manage resources)? But even that eventually fizzled out of my mind. Once again it came down to a question of convenience and not preference (more about his in the next entry).

The Recycling Expert – Brigitte Morin
So finally a solution found me. I had been working with the sustainability coordinator at the SFUO on a campus composting program; Brigitte discovered that we could compost on campus and actually save money. And as it turned out her contract was up… quelle fortune. It was a natural fit to have her consult with us on creating a new recycling bin for the campus. She had the know-how and tenacity to make recycling bins work again. But most importantly, she believed that we could do better.

The Designer – Genevieve Quesnel
The recycling survey identified oodles of design deficiencies with the old recycling bins on campus. They were inaccessible, they were inflexible, and they were unattractive (some people didn’t want to even use the bins because they looked unclean). There were even complaints from the university administration (the bins were clunky, hard to move, and an eye soar). Gen is an interior design coordinator for uOttawa with a knack for seeing how people will interact with the objects in their environment. Her job was to find a way to create a more functionally interactive design.
*** Little known fact – the new recycling centers are known as the GQ-2. The GQ because they are named after Gen as the original designer and version 2 because this was the second incarnation of the reformed bins. ***

Technologist – Tiana Dargent
Technologist??? Okay this is a little complicated to explain but in a nut shell there is a strong visual component that is linked to recycling. I won’t go into details here but the physical shape of the bin is only half the story. The other half is the signage and instructions. Tiana is a specialist in CAD technologies and university visual standards. Her job was to make the bin easier to understand from a user’s perspective.

So there you have it. The core team that put the recycling bins together. Of course there were dozens of people behind the scenes that made the whole thing happen, including the students conducting surveys and the university administration for funding the whole initiative; but I like the think that this was the nucleus. Good projects need good people and since recycling is something I hold near and dear to me, I am glad that the team working on this project was the best out there.

Idea: Free Stuff

Today, let’s delve into the idea of stuff. We need stuff. We want stuff. We want stuff we don’t need. Sometimes we realize that. Where does it go? Bingo…

When someone realizes they have something they don’t need, the first thought is generally one of a few options: Can I throw it out? Can I sell it? Can I give it away?

Unfortunately, not enough people ask themselves how much they need any given item BEFORE they acquire it. But, we can talk about that later.

The first question should be: Can I reuse this or use it for something else? Or, Can I give it to someone I know needs it? Failing that, it should be donated…to the free store!

Each year, we organize a Dump and Run on campus to account for all of the stuff that residence students (primarily first year university students) decide to chuck when they are moving out. We all know that you bring very little to residence, shop a bit too much during the year, and end up with so much stuff you can’t imagine fitting into your suitcases.

That’s where I come in. Collection of all these items. Let’s see what kinds of stuff we’ve found:

• Food (non perishable) – The Food Bank on campus gets all of that. Awesome.


• Food (opened or perishable) – Food Collectives (People’s Republic of Delicious) and people in need


• Clothing – All shapes and sizes of clothing; old and new (with tags!), clean and dirty, cheap and expensive brands


• Shoes – Shoes of all sorts in various conditions. Some of them are really broken and we don’t know what to do with them…


• Bedding – We got a lot of pillows, which are pretty hard to donate. They make for good stuffing, so if you sew a lot, let me know! Otherwise we got blankets, sheets, duvets, etc


• Dishes – TONS of dishes, and we have to wash them all. Yuck. It’s so worth it though!


• Random – SO many things that make so little sense, we wonder where they came from…
  As if people throw out this much stuff…
  

Moral of the story? Think BEFORE you buy. But, if you end up with too much stuff, be creative! Think long and hard about what you can do with it to make sure it doesn’t end up in a landfill. We’ll update later on exactly HOW MUCH stuff would have been dumped.

-sarah jayne-

Building A Better Bin part II

When you are assigned the task of making the campus greener by improving the recycling system, you can’t just jump in without some idea of the past. Before diving into a lake there are a couple of things that you have to double check before you plunge in head-first. How cold is the water, how deep, are there are jagged rocks, and are there any leaches? I mean there are more things to consider than just this but let’s not over-kill this analogy. First things first, when did recycling begin on campus?

Back in 1992 the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) initiated a bold plan to ensure that landfills wouldn’t start bursting at the seams with waste. The MOE mandated that all academic institutions create plans to divert 60% of their waste under the threat of a fine that could reach up to $4 Million. Luckily uOttawa already had a burgeoning program in place. It was a very simple program with drop-off points and a collection center.

Now this system was great and it served the campus well for over a decade, but things started to change quickly. New products on the market and an increase in the amount of packaging began to overwhelm the system. The campus practically doubled in population since 1990 and the market value of many recyclable products diminished because of cheap production coming from Asia. Add the fact the MOE wasn’t even conducting the inspections for waste that they had promised and you can see why the campus recycling system wasn’t doing so well.

Now there were far too many variables to address all at once and far too few people to address them, so we took advantage of a beautiful but underused program at the University called the Experiential Learning Program. Enter Eric Crighton a new professor in the Geography and Environmental Studies Department. He agreed to take part in the program and have a few of his students conduct recycling surveys for the campus. The surveys were designed to help us understand how to make the system better.

The first round of surveys told us some very interesting things. One, there weren’t enough bins on campus. Two, of the bins that did exist, nobody knew where they were. Three, there weren’t enough posters telling people to recycle. And four, nobody knew what could and couldn’t be recycled. A tall order for the first round of surveys, but better to have something to work with rather than nothing.

So now that we had a road map of what people wanted, we were ready to put a plan into place. The next step was to put a team together that could create the new bins we needed.

-jon-

Building A Better Bin

While I was a student here I was always extremely disappointed with the recycling system. Of course I never really had a complete picture of everything that was going on. I never knew about the initiation of a recycling program on campus in 1992; I never knew about the night crews that collect and sort waste; and I certainly didn’t know about the politics behind recycling bins.

There is so much more to the story than you think and I want to share a little bit about our experience so that others can profit and make the proverbial “better mouse trap”. The title of this little series is ‘building a better bin’ and it is called such because in the pursuit of creating a more responsible society I believe that we can start with a better recycling bin.

Our story begins back in 2007 when the University of Ottawa was going through a little bit of a rough patch with regards to green public relations. The Globe and Mail publishes an annual survey about how student perceive the environmental initiatives of their campus. That year the University of Ottawa didn’t do particularly well. It’s not that the University wasn’t a good environmental steward; it’s just that people didn’t think that it was. Sometimes perception is reality.

Now there are many things that the University can do to be greener but none is more omnipresent than to do more recycling. Everyone understands the impacts of recycling, you put a bottle in a bin and you help save the planet. Nice and easy, no questions asked. But it isn’t really as easy as that. You see even if everyone understands that recycling is good, less than half the people on campus actually do it. So how can you create a bin that actually gets more people to recycle? Is that even possible?

So there are 4 things that I am going to talk about that will actually prove that yes indeed you can make people recycle more with a better bin. Research, aesthetics, locations, and materials; mix all these things together and you can make something special happen. So do you want to know how?