It is official; there are no more disposable fountain drink cups being sold at uOttawa! These have been one of the many items that posed such a challenge since they are not recyclable; they are composed of several different materials and (unlike coffee cups) there is no cost-effective way of separating/reusing them. Not only were they not recyclable, but people often thought they were, which led to them contaminating the metal/plastic/glass category in the recycling stations at food service locations. When there is simply too much of the wrong item in the bin (50%+), we sadly end up throwing it out; either the company leaves it in our garage or the employee just doesn’t have time to go through the bags of recycling and sort the items inside the recycling stations. But as of September 2015, we no longer have to worry about these cups! (Thank you Food Services!) When you aren’t on campus, and do end up coming across a location that still uses these (most fast food locations)...

As part of Waste Reduction Week (October 19-25, 2015), the Office of Campus Sustainability started working on an independent art project, a photographic essay that hoped to document the lives of adherents to a growing, subversive subculture on campus known only as… “mug life”. Okay, so we set up a photo booth at Muggy Mondays, but the photos were still awesome!! Every day the campus needlessly produces over 6000 paper cups; that’s already a lot of waste, but many wind up impossible to recycle as well. “What most people don’t realize is that you can’t recycle one of those paper cups if there’s still coffee in it: if you toss it in the recycling bin and the coffee seeps into the rest of the paper, it can’t be recycled – it becomes waste”, explains Brigitte Morin, Recycling Coordinator. “That’s why it’s really important to dump the coffee out first. Most of the recycling stations on campus have a drain built in to them, below the orange “liquid” sign, for exactly that.” To enc...

Dans le cadre de la Semaine de réduction des déchets, qui s’est déroulée du 19 au 25 octobre 2015, le Bureau du développement durable a entamé un projet artistique indépendant : un essai photographique chroniquant les activités des adeptes à ce mouvement subversif de plus en plus répandu sur le campus, nommé… « la vie de tasse en tasse ». Donc, voilà, nous avons installé une cabine photo aux Matinées caféinées et, croyez-le ou non, les photos sont plutôt géniales!! Mais une cause importante sous-tend ce projet. En effet, savez-vous que chaque jour, plus de 6000 gobelets en carton s’ajoutent aux déchets sur le campus? Un nombre impressionnant, surtout quand on sait qu’ils sont souvent impossibles à recycler. « La plupart des gens ne comprennent pas qu’on ne peut pas recycler ces gobelets s’ils contiennent encore du café », explique Brigitte Morin, coordonnatrice du recyclage. « En plus, si vous le jetez dans le bac à recyclage et que le café imprègne le reste du papie...