The Sustainabilitree

Osoji, qui signifie littéralement "grand nettoyage" en japonais, a traditionnellement lieu à la fin du mois de décembre. À la fin de l'année, afin de saluer et d'inviter les divinités à entrer dans la nouvelle année, les gens font un grand nettoyage en jetant tout ce qui est vieux, inutile ou cassé et qui s'est accumulé au cours de l'année écoulée. Quel est le lien exact entre le nettoyage et le développement durable ? Le nettoyage permet de faire le point sur ce que l'on possède déjà et d'apprécier chaque objet que l'on a, ce qui calme le besoin d'acheter le dernier gadget à la mode. Pensez aussi au temps et à l'espace dont vous disposez pour vous informer lorsque vous ne cherchez pas cette paire de chaussettes dépareillées. Je pense aussi sincèrement que nettoyer son espace physique aide beaucoup avec son espace mental également (croyez-en l'avis d'une personne autrefois désordonnée...). Voici quelques conseils pour faire votr...

Osoji, in Japanese literally meaning “big cleaning”, traditionally happens by the end of December. As the old year comes to an end, in order to greet and invite the deities in for the new year, people engage in a deep clean by discarding anything old, unnecessary, or broke items that may have piled up in the past year. How exactly is cleaning linked to sustainability? Cleaning helps to get clarity on what you already own and appreciate every item you have, calming the need to buy the latest trendy gadget. Also consider the time and space you get to inform yourself when you are not looking for this mismatched pair of socks. I also truly think that cleaning your physical space helps a great deal with your mental one as well (take the word from a formerly messy person…). Here are some tips to do your very own Osoji. Create a vision for what you want your year to look like For the past few years, I have been a huge fan of vision boards. Take a white sheet of paper, write your goals and...

The holidays are right around the corner! Unfortunately, it has become a highly consumerist time of the year. Before you roll your eyes and contemplate closing this blog because you don’t want me to ruin your holiday spirit, hear me out. I think there’s a solid balance to strike between fun and festive, and opting for ways to reduce the negative environmental impacts. Here are some tips that I am working to incorporate into my holiday festivities. Gift Giving Sometimes it can feel stressful to find the perfect gift for someone. For the past few years, I have had the rule that unless a person specifically requests a material item, I gift an experience. I love this approach because you can easily tailor the experience to any budgetary requirements. Also, the best part is that you get to spend quality time with your loved ones and make memories. However, if you choose to go the material gift route, DIY gifts from recycled materials is a good alternative. There are so many amazing tu...

Les vacances arrivent! Malheureusement, c'est devenu une période de l'année hautement consumériste. Avant de lever les yeux au ciel et de fermer ce blog parce que vous ne voulez pas que je gâche votre esprit des fêtes, écoutez-moi bien. Je pense qu'il y a un bon équilibre à trouver entre le plaisir et la fête et les moyens de réduire les impacts négatifs sur l'environnement. Voici quelques conseils que je m'efforce d'intégrer à mes festivités de fin d'année.   Les cadeaux Il peut parfois être stressant de trouver le cadeau idéal pour quelqu'un. Depuis quelques années, j'ai une règle d'offrir une expérience à moins que la personne ne demande expressément un article matériel. J'aime cette approche, car vous pouvez facilement adapter l'expérience à tous les budgets. De plus, le plus intéressant est que vous pouvez passer du temps de qualité avec vos proches et créer des souvenirs. Toutefois, si vous optez pour un cadeau matériel, d...

Yesterday was World Fisheries Day! In that spirit, Celeste Digiovanni, a PhD student in Environmental Geography studying marine governance in Canada wrote a post inspired from the point of view of an iconic species, the sockeye. My eyes opened. There were thousands of others like me. I saw some emerging from their little jelly-like sacks amongst the gravel. I felt the cold, tasteless water on my scales for the first time. I gasped for my first breath and found it- was I alive? We started flapping our bits around and found rhythm, some of us more coordinated than others. I started to navigate this new underwater world beyond the sack that once confined me; slowly leaving, back to the gravel. New life. We swam around the river as light turned into dark. We fed on the zooplankton that we could find. We outgrew our river, and as those before us, ventured into a much saltier and colder world. We encountered others that resembled us throughout our journey. Some were trapped in nets, but a ...

As a millennial, I have a guilty passion for Instagram. So, when I started my waste reduction journey, it quickly became one of my main sources of information. To me, waste reduction belonged to the broader minimalist movement. Getting rid of unused stuff, stopping buying things you will not use and reuse what you had seemed tinted with good old common sense. You know, the one our grandparents had?  Even though the aesthetics of owning less seemed appealing to me, I soon fell into a pit of despair as I scrolled though kitchens with matching glass containers neatly stacked in a pristine white background. Every room in the house seemed to follow the same pattern: everything matching in a neat neutral background.  Thinking of taking my reusable water bottle is a real achievement, so attaining the zero-waste home was like walking on the moon. As I kept researching, the very idea of buying containers seemed to defeat the purpose of zero waste in the first place. Why would I buy stu...

Étant une milléniale, j'ai une passion coupable pour Instagram. Alors, lorsque j'ai commencé mon parcours de réduction des déchets, c’est rapidement devenu l'une de mes principales sources d'information. Pour moi, la réduction des déchets appartenait au mouvement plus large du minimaliste. Se débarrasser des choses inutilisées, arrêter d'acheter des choses qu’on n'utilisera pas et réutiliser ce que nous avons déjà me semblait teinté de gros bon sens. Vous savez, celui qu'avaient nos grands-parents ?   Même si l'esthétique de posséder moins me semblait séduisante, je suis vite tombée dans un gouffre de désespoir en faisant défiler les cuisines où les récipients en verre assortis se trouvaient soigneusement disposés sur un fond blanc immaculé. Toutes les pièces de la maison semblaient suivre le même schéma : tout était assorti sur un fond neutre et net. Penser à prendre ma bouteille d'eau réutilisable relève de l’exploit, alors atteindre une maison zér...

When news finally settled and it was determined that uOttawa, along with every other institution in Canada, was going to close its doors for an entire academic season, there were a lot of projects that were still ongoing. Fast forward to almost two years later and people are starting to come back to the campus, and those projects were completed. So let's take a quick tour of some of the sustainability things that happened on campus while you were gone! UCU Park Just behind the UCU (near the Pivik entrance) the land has been completely landscaped and a new park was created. The small park is a 4-season park with seating, a stone dust path, and a bunch of Indigenous, native, and edible plants. If you are in the garden at just the right time of the year, you can see the wild raspberries! Other improvements include a safer declined path to the building and an expanded terrace near the entrance doors (the former smokers pit) with a new seating area. Morisset Window Mural Safe Wings wor...

Il est difficile de décider par où commencer, mais je pense que la meilleure façon de commencer est de dire que tout ce projet a commencé sur Instagram (je parie que vous n'entendez pas cela très souvent !)... Il y a environ un an, je faisais défiler ma page, aimant des posts à gauche et à droite comme nous le faisons tous, lorsque je suis tombée sur une publicité concernant un nouveau programme que la World Wildlife Fund (WWF) avait mis en place pour les étudiants universitaires/postsecondaires. L'annonce a attiré mon attention et je me suis dit : "Pourquoi ne pas aller voir ?" J'avais un peu de temps libre et quel mal cela pouvait-il faire ? L'annonce ressemblait un peu à ceci (voir ci-dessous) et j'ai pensé que cela pourrait être un excellent ajout à mon CV en pleine expansion, me permettant de m'impliquer davantage dans ma communauté universitaire. J'ai regardé le contenu, j'ai décidé "Hé, je peux le faire !" et je me suis inscri...

It’s hard to decide where to begin, but I think the best way to start is by saying that this whole project began on Instagram (I bet you don’t hear that very often!)… About a year ago I was scrolling through my page, liking posts left and right as we all do, when I came across an advertisement about a new program that the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) had put out for university/post-secondary students. It caught my eye and I decided “Why not check it out?”, I had some spare time on my hands and what harm could it do? The ad looked a little something like this (see below) and I thought it might be a great addition to my growing resume; allowing me to get further involved in my university community. I looked through the contents, decided “Hey, I can do this!” and signed up right away. When my friends heard about this new initiative, they asked questions like “Why would you do this, it has nothing to do with your program or future career?”, and to that I say: why the heck not? The Living Pla...

I don't think that I need to convince you that birds hitting windows and dying is a bad thing. Bird collisions with buildings is right at the top of the list of bird fatalities ( along with cats ), and with the huge decline of migratory birds in recent years, it makes sense that large institutions do what they can to help reduce collisions. So here is the first problem. There are no vertical transparent surfaces in nature, thus birds are completely unaware that they are about to hit a window. Birds are often confused because they see the reflection of a tree in the window and try to land on the tree. University campuses are usually covered in windows (modern buildings tend to have lots of windows to let in natural light and convey transparency... also they look cool). And, university campuses have a lot of trees. So mix these two things together and you get a lot of reflected trees causing bird collisions. The second problem has to do with the solutions, in that they are expensive....

It appears most are aware that the fashion industry is wasteful, but consumers and corporations are not doing everything they can to help correct this. The entire concept of fashion has been used as a symbol of status for many years. The significance that the fashion industry puts on materiality is toxic to the environment. A 2019 Business Insider article says this industry “produces 10% of all humanity's carbon emissions, is the second-largest consumer of the world's water supply, and pollutes the oceans with microplastics”.  In addition, “85% of all textiles go to the dump each year. And washing some types of clothes sends thousands of bits of plastic into the ocean”.  We cannot put all the blame on the corporations producing the clothing, because we the consumers often look for quantity over quality. With everchanging fashion trends, consumers move towards fast and cheap fashion to keep up. There are many ways we can reduce our environmental footprint as consumers. We can ...