RecycleMania has launched at the University of Ottawa, and indeed around North America, and this year we are using a new tactic that we picked up from our friends over at Penn State Sustainability. It's called Toilet Paper. Basically every 2 weeks we are posting infographics about food waste and recycling in the washroom stalls around campus. The beauty of this approach is that we basically have a captive audience. The downside is that we get complaints about using paper to promote recycling. But rest assured that we did do a lot of thinking before we decided to post paper... Here are our findings. Large Posters vs. Small Posters We considered using large posters to spread the word about food waste and found that because of their positioning on the walls, the visibility of most posters is low and they are rarely read. Numbers vary wildly, but it could be assumed that between 4% and 8% people that pass by a poster will read it. Conversely, nearly 100% of posters posted i...

Every year, the UI GreenMetric University Rankings for sustainability loom over my head. It is kind of a strange feeling really. I know that uOttawa is a leader when it comes to sustainability but sustainability is a broad topic and depending on how you want to measure sustainability, the results could vary. Let me give you an example. uOttawa has amazingly low GHG emissions. Compared to other campuses of our size, we are a third to half the emissions of others. But when it comes to the number of courses that we offer related to sustainability... well we have some but a place like the University of British Columbia or Dalhousie have us beat hands down. Or what about green space? uOttawa has a dense urban campus, meaning that we have a very small energy footprint, but we aren't like Royal Roads who have over 300 hectares or natural forest setting... Which one is more sustainable? I worry about what our score will be not because a bad score will reflect poorly upon our office,...