A Grand Flush

So last Friday was World Toilet Day and I figured that I really gotta get this post out before I get an old post. But I didn't have internet access this weekend and ... well you know how it is.

Anyways WTD 2010 was celebrated on campus with a squat-a-thon and some great trivia games by the good people of the Health Promotion team. Yours truly (although maybe less so with this creepy moustache) even gave a presentation about water related issues on campus. So this post is dedicated to 2 things: a shout out to water sanitation and a bit of info about uOttawa's water management initiatives.

I remember last year I counselled one of my student employees to do a project in her business class about the mighty toilet as one of the best inventions of all time. She got a great mark and learned something really important; mainly that half of the world's population does not have access to a toilet. In return, she schooled me about things I hadn't known about; mainly the millions of deaths related to water sanitation issues (which has killed more people collectively than all the wars in the 20th century).

A lot of people get the whole idea of water scarcity, you know - that the world is running out of potable water. But they take for granted the extent to which water is pervasive in their every day life. In Canada, the average person uses about 300 litres of water every day. Think about it, 8 litres of drinking water, 20 litres for every flush of the toilet, another 75 in the shower, not to mention all the water needed to grow your food, wash your clothes... you get the point.

When you look at the campus, we consume about 1.6 Million litres every day (or 18 litres every second) which isn't great but we are actually one of the leaders in Canada for water conservation. UBC's website published that their campus used approximately 7 times more water last year than the uOttawa campus.

There is actually nothing really special about the way we conserve water at uOttawa. A lot of the savings come from doing the basics (low flow shower heads and toilets and things of that nature), but there are one or two fun things that we have accomplished (like using black water from the Aquatic labs to cool the campus and reduce energy consumption). There has also been some serious talk about using grey water for toilets on campus rather than potable City water.

Before I go I want to mention is the concept of "What is a sustainable amount of water to consume on campus"? This is a question that the Office of Campus Sustainability was thinking about last year when we were looking for a water consumption goal for the campus. We are thinking about setting our goal at the amount of water that naturally falls on the campus through precipitation (essentially only using the rain and snow that falls on campus). I don't know how long it is going to take to get to this goal but I do know that when you put it in the context of WTD, we need to get it right before it's too late.

-jon

http://thesustainabilitree.blogspot.com/http://thesustainabilitree.blogspot.com/

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Furniture Needs a Home Too

I was rencently flipping through the uOttawa ‘Research Perspectives’ magazine, and I came across a familiar face. Dr. Variola, a biomedical engineer chose a recyclied desk (the one in the picture) from our recycled furniture program.

Each year, we renovate and optimize spaces around campus; which send an unbeleivable amount of furniture to landfill. This furniture is usually in perfect condition, was very expensive (the average workstation with filing cabinet and task chair has a price tag of about $2,200), and may only be a year old.

A few years ago, we decided to start a program to collect this furniture, and offer it to other depatments on campus (rather than buying the same things). If a department or University service needs to get rid of their furniture, we get it transferred to our storage, where it is sorted and put on display for future university employees. If a university employee is in need of a specific piece of furniture, they come by and choose what would be best for their space. The furniture which is unwanted from the University community and is destined for landfill is then offered to different local charities in need (Habitat for Humanity, Sierra Youth Coalition, etc.).

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this Furniture recycling program, sofar this year, we have avoided sending approximately 15 metric tonnes of furniture to landfill (which is equivalent to about 25 20-yard waste bins, and savings of $192,000 for the University – the avoided costs of not having to buy new furniture and the savings of not paying for landfill fees).

-brigitte

http://thesustainabilitree.blogspot.com/

Love and Surveys

Okay so you didn’t hear this from me but I may have gotten in over my head. You see I am working on this project with Eric Crighton, a prof over in the Geography and Environmental Studies. Actually we have been working together for the past four years on this project. The objective of our project is very simple. Use first year students to change the way that our school work is conducted to basically save the world.

Please allow me to put together a couple of concepts that have crossed my path recently.

1- There is this concept called the Living Laboratory. It is pretty simple; use the campus as a huge on-going experiment so that every day events can become teachable moments. So a building gets built – engineering students study how this happens. A new marketing campaign is launched – communications students evaluate its success. A jogging club is formed – health science students help create an optimum training schedule. And so on and so on.

2- Course Work Ecology – why is it that we are always examining the exact same question? There is a train in Toronto leaving at 4pm heading towards Ottawa and travelling at 80km per hour. At the same time there is a train leaving from Montreal at 4:45 headed towards Ottawa travelling at 75km per hour. How long will it take for the Toronto train and the Montreal train to completely bore you and insult your intelligence? Here is a better idea, if everything in nature is recycled (and I am thinking of the mighty dung beetle here) how come the same can’t be done with our homework? How about assignments that actually mean something and can be used by others to help solve some of society’s problems?

3- Experiential Learning – okay you got me… this isn’t really a concept so much as it is an actual program. But the principles are worth mentioning again. You do some volunteer work with an organization in need and the University recognizes this work so that you can get course credit. This is a really good idea because you can do volunteer work without having to sacrifice any academic time.

So let’s bring these all together and determine why I am a little in over my head. I work with Eric Crighton on an experiential learning program with his first year global environmental issues course. What we have done is created a series of surveys about environmental issues on campus for the students to administer to the campus. We will then have the students interpret the results so that they can make recommendations about how to make the campus a more sustainable place.

It doesn’t stop here. The raw data from the results will be given to other services on campus so that they too can see how to improve their environmental performance. For example, one of the surveys deals with cycling and the barriers to cycling on campus. This information with be shared with Parking and Sustainable Transportation Services and Physical Resources Service so that we can make the campus more bikeable. Then the information will be kicked off to some upper level statistic courses so that they can interpret real data instead of fake sample sets. And finally the information will be shared with some Masters students in Psychology so that they can study some of the decision mechanisms behind making more environmental choices.

So I am sitting at my office trying to pull all the survey information together. There are over 300 students in the class and each student is conducting 10 surveys. The surveys all have at least 13 questions to tabulate so that means 39,000 answers that need to be input into an Excel file. I have been calling on everyone in my team to help bring this thing together (Amina, Vedrana, and Brigitte) and things are moving slowly. But I know that it’s worth it because I truly do believe that love and SURVEYS will help save the world.

-jon

http://thesustainabilitree.blogspot.com/