Hey, did you see the demolition of the Child Studies building? That building beside the Vanier Building? Well if you didn’t see it you can see the hole in the ground that was left behind. Now in case you wanted to know a little bit about how green buildings make a difference you are about to get your wish. You may or may not know but the new Social Science Tower that is going into the place of the old Child Studies Building is going to be LEED certified. Fun fact number 2, if you want to have a LEED certified building than you have to demolish the old building in an environmentally friendly manner. So when the old building was being knocked down there was a series of environmental measures that had to be implemented. The two most notable ones were the dust control measures and the material recycling. Dust control was a nice touch and actually kind of funny to watch. It consisted of having someone using a big hose to spray water on all of the pieces of the building as it was being knock...

Picture from Dan Thompson Design Le lieu pour le colloque World Changing Careers (WCC) a sans aucun doute aidé aux participants à mettre leurs états d'esprit au bon endroit. Le vaste campus de l’Université de la Colombie Britannique était entouré de nature à chaque tournant : grandes vignes grimpant les bâtiments, énormes arbres partout, l'océan à proximité et bien plus encore. Voir telle beauté a suscité un profond désir de préserver les ressources de notre terre. Nous savons tous qu'il est vrai ; notre demande de ressources et des services de l'écosystème est continuellement croissante lorsqu’il y a une baisse de la capacité de la terre de fournir ces ressources et services. « Nous constatons déjà les conséquences ; l'effondrement de la pêche dans le monde entier menace la vie et les moyens de subsistance, la perte des terres arables contribue à l'insécurité alimentaire mondiale et la réduction des approvisionnements en moyenne de l'eau potable signifie q...

As you all know the University of Ottawa is the new recipient of what appears to be the first mechanical composter in an Ontario university setting. That’s right... ici on compost! So here’s the low down. A mechanical composter is exactly what it sounds like, a composter that mechanically composts its contents. This is different from most other composters which are typically simple wind row systems. Mechanical composting systems are typically in-vessel systems (i.e. inside a big tube) that rotate periodically. This is a good time to add a side note. In case you wanted to know, the process of composting is very rudimentary. You take organic waste, you add oxygen, and there you have it. Composting is actually a ridiculously easy process, the goal is really just to try to keep to the bacteria in the garbage alive and they will take care of the rest. So the university’s new composter rotates the waste inside of it every hour to keep feeding oxygen into the system. Two weeks later the organ...

Picture from www.greencleaningmatters.co.u k Most people dread using those old, ineffective “hot air hand-cookers” found everywhere, but there’s a new wave of energy-efficient high-speed hand dryers on the rise. Keeping in mind, uOttawa stocks 100% post-consumer recycled paper towels, which of the two is really faster, cheaper and more environmentally friendly? Physical Resources Services hired me for the summer and asked me to figure out the answer to this question. In our analysis, we evaluated a range of electric hand dryers and compared them to using paper towels. The results named the “Jet Towel” as the best alternative hand dryer. Designed by Mitsubishi Electric in Japan, it’s a time-tested effective high-speed hand dryer. Unlike conventional convection hand dryers, the Jet Towel uses a high speed curtain of air to “scrape” excess water off your hands. Now, considering the resources associated with using the Jet Towel or paper towel, it is in fact more ecological to use the...

Image uploaded from the EVO blog ( check it out ) I may have titled this blog with a little bit of a misleading statement; technically the plant isn’t newly open for business, it has been open for business for quite a while but trust me... this is kind of new. Now the second thing that I should address before I really get into this is the notion of a negawatt (what is it and why should you care). Well a negawatt is a concept that has been floating around for a bit of time now, but only as a whisper really. The idea is simple. A watt is a unit of power; 15 watts is what it takes to run your typical compact fluorescent light bulb. Now at the University we use thousands and thousands of lights so we don’t deal with watts, we deal with megawatts (a million watts). Now take that concept and flip it on its head. Rather than generating energy, say a megawatt of energy, a negawatt does the opposite, it removes a megawatt of energy. And that’s the deal right there; negawatts are the amount ...

Un contenant à emporté avec le compost? Absolument! L’Université d’Ottawa est maintenant la première institution postsecondaire parmi les autres en Ontario à se procurer sa propre machine à compost électrique. De plus, nous devançons la Ville d’Ottawa, qui planifie lancer son système de collectes organiques d’ici le printemps prochain. Tandis que à cet automne (2009), nous mettrons notre de compostage en marche en commençant par la foire alimentaire au Centre universitaire. D'ailleurs, notre fournisseur de services alimentaires, Chartwells, a accepté de convertir tous ses contenants à emporter, tasses et coutellerie jetables à des contenants à emporter, tasses et coutellerie compostables ! Brigitte Morin, Coordonnatrice du recyclage et du réacheminement des déchets : bmorin@uottawa.ca www.durable.uottawa.ca ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is that a take-out container with compost? Absolutely! The University of ...

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning. -Albert Einstein J’ai participé au colloque de World Changing Careers (WCC) à l’Université de la Colombie-Britannique du 23 au 27 juillet 2009. Des étudiants, des chefs d’entreprise, des éducateurs, le gouvernement, des ONG et des professionnels de tous les domaines se sont réunis à Vancouver. Ce colloque a donné les outils nécessaires pour poursuivre une carrière en durabilité et comment intégrer les idées de pointe afin d'effectuer une différence positive. Nous avons recueilli une gamme d’idées à travers diverses discussions de groupes, discours principaux et ateliers sur la façon de reconfigurer les systèmes de notre société pour répondre aux besoins futurs de notre génération. Avec ce symposium, nous sommes arrivés à réaliser que n’importe quelle carrière, que ça soit en affaire, éducation, agriculture, médias ou encore plus, peuvent facilement intégrer la durabili...

Photo from re-char.com Whether or not you’re a fan of free market capitalism, there are a few basic assumptions you are following on a regular basis. You know that money makes the world go ‘round and that the economy is a sometimes volatile but very necessary force in our current system. You don’t have to agree with this. I’m going to try not to give an economics lesson (without my economics texts I’ll probably fudge something ) but I think we can work off a few simple concepts that relate to the environment and how it can react to an economic system that seems, pretty plainly, not to care about it.When a corporation acts, it acts in the interest of capital, and almost never in the interest of the environment. This idea will become a more detailed blog post later. So the title of this entry is Carbon Offsetting. Let’s talk about that. Apparently, this whole economy talk is where things like carbon offsetting come in. As we know, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which contributes ...

Little by little things do change, even on campus. Indeed the day is coming when there will no longer be any cars on campus at all. The University of Ottawa is slowly but surely becoming a pedestrian campus. You may have noticed that there have been a few new additions to the campus lately, in the form of large square concrete flower beds. The first instinct is to assume that these concrete containers are part of an initiative to keep the campus beautiful, and undeniably you would be right. The planters are filled with wonderfully colourful plants that do serve to beautify the campus... but there is more to them. Emboldened by his new post as University Ground Keeper, Benoit has been working hard to keep the campus beautiful. And one of the ways to accomplish this is to impede the ruin of grass and plants by eliminating the flow of cars that continuously trample them. The concrete planters have been strategically deployed on campus to reduce the movement of cars on campus in pl...