Imagine this, you just finished a long week of work and magically you have the entire weekend off... no reports to finish or class work to get caught up on... just time for you to relax. You decide to spend your day outside because you already spend so much time in front of a screen. So you grab your bike or your hiking shoes, choose a location, grab your water bottle, and head out. There's only one problem, when you get outside the air is dense and grey... in fact it's so thick you find it hard to breathe.
It is a little hard to remember now, but there was a time in Ottawa when you couldn't go outside on certain days because of smog. Smog days, as they were affectionately known, were the bi-product of several things - but for the most part we can sum this up to combustion from heating and coal-fired plants producing electricity. In 2005, there were a dozen smog days in Ottawa resulting in 305 deaths according to the Ontario Medical Association.
Poor air quality is nothing new and it is sometimes considered a side-effect of progress. As factories create products, their chimneys belch out smoke. There is a rich history of the impacts of coal induced fogs in London...in fact the fog was sometimes considered a character in many British novels. Even a century later, poor air quality is still not a stranger to many people. Often China and India are thought of as the poster children for poor air quality and there are many recent stories about how the pandemic shutdowns greatly improved air quality in these countries.
Luckily for Ottawa, the last coal-fired in Ontario was close in 2014. This has led to an unprecedented drop in number of smog days in the Province.
So hurray... we won and there aren't any problems anymore! Except.... As of 2021, the World Health Organization estimated 7 million deaths annual from poor air quality. Poor air is still considered the number one killer world-wide and is thought to increase complications for many other diseases, including COVID-19 according to adjunct prof Hong Chen.
Poor air quality from factories and power plants is one thing, but poor air can come from a lot of other places too. The quality of air indoors can also be a big problem, especially when it comes to dust and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). That's not to let outdoor air quality off the hook altogether; particulate matter and dust along with the cocktail of chemicals that come from car exhaust can play havoc on our lungs.
Okay, so let's get to business. What has uOttawa done to keep the air clean? We aren't going to cover the mechanical solutions that are in place (like increasing the air-flow through buildings); instead we are going to focus on the lesser known interventions.
Green furniture
A big part of creating green buildings is ensuring good Indoor Air Quality. Why? Well it's because you have to work and take your classes inside a building. So you are breathing in that air all day. It has been documented that poor air quality leads to worse focus and less productivity. So uOttawa purchases furniture that has low or no VOCs, thus ensuring that there is minimal off-gassing.
Green Cleaning Products
Along with green furniture, uOttawa also uses environmentally friendly cleaning products. This greatly improves air quality especially for people with are impacted by chemical sensitivities. There is an added benefit too; using these products reduces the amount of chemicals our janitorial staff are exposed to making their jobs a lot safer.
Indoor plants
You may have noticed more plants popping up on campus. This isn't an accident. Plants are excellent at removing impurities in the air and have the added benefit of helping calm people down and providing some much needed biophilia.
Car-free core
It seems kind of obvious in the winter time, but cars are always spewing out gasses from their tailpipes. So it stands to reason that if you keep cars away from people (the way the University has by removing cars from the core of the campus), you will make the quality of air those people breathe. It is also worth mentioning that cars also kick-up a lot of dust when they move around, creating more air quality issues.
Electric vehicle fleet
Low-emission vehicles aren't new to uOttawa. Bicycles have been used on campus by Protection Services for over 30 years and there is a fleet of electric utility carts running under the campus for over 20 years. So when Facilities Service on campus switched the majority of their outdoor fleet over to electric vehicles, it made sense because these vehicles spend their entire lives driving around on campus.
Electric yard equipment
In the summer of 2022, uOttawa started moving towards electric yard equipment (lawn mowers, leaf blowers, etc...) instead of using gas powered equipment. This has a big impact on air quality because the motors used in this equipment are often very inefficient and spew out a lot of exhaust. An added bonus to changing to electric equipment is how quiet it is in comparison to traditional gas-powered equipment.
All this sounds good but there is still more work to do. There are certainly more vehicles to convert over to electric, and we can't forget that uOttawa heats the campus primarily with natural gas which contributes to air quality issues. But by far the biggest remaining source of poor air on campus comes from smoking. Many universities have created smoke-free campuses but given that uOttawa is in the middle of the city with many points of entry, that might be harder.
If you want to know more about some of the clean air initiatives on campus, check out our website. And if you have ideas on other ways to improve air quality, send us a message at sustainable@uOttawa.ca.
~ jon rausseo - campus sustainability expert
