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 b...

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...

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 ov...

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 initi...