Coca-cola helped popularize the modern image of Santa Clause... they didn't invent it but they used it to great effect to help sell their product and forever link Christmas and Coca-Cola. Every year our office participates in something known as the Alternative Student Break (ASB) . This activity gives students the opportunity to do a full semester of volunteer work in just one week. During the winter semester, we give a workshop about concepts related to waste and then we do a waste audit to see how the campus is doing. This past month we experimented with a new topic... anti-consumption! This idea came to us as we debated the topic of whether it was a bad thing that the Free Store was promoting the idea of consumption... which means consuming more resources. I won't spoil the entire workshop but I am going to give you a breakdown of what we did and what we discovered. The Workshop Our first day was spent going over the concepts of consumption, consumerism, and marketing. Ess...

Every day, an untold amount of garbage makes it to the landfill in Ottawa. And every day, hundreds of people in need go without many of the very items that are filling those Ottawa landfills. Sometimes when I think about the whole thing it seems like a cruel joke, an utter disaster of resource management. But not every day is like this... This past February, the Office of Campus Sustainability teamed up the the Centre for Global and Community Engagement for an Alternative Student Break placement. Seven volunteers came into our offices and set about the task of making sure that overflowing landfills and people in need were a thing of the past. They decided to rewrite the ending of what happens to clothes, household goods, and electronics here in the City of Ottawa. Essentially, the volunteer group spent the week learning about sustainability issues, especially things related to waste management. Then the volunteers started creating inventories and calling up every local charity...

Reading week is upon us and that means another edition of the Alternative Student Break (ASB) has arrived. Some of you might remember that last year we had about 9 volunteers that joined our office to create recycling installations on campus. The installations were pretty cool. Our volunteers made a giant chess board out of recycled bottles, a forest out of textbooks, a throne out of cans, etc... The installations were placed all around the campus to share the message of recycling. The participants of course took tonnes of pictures of the experience and told all their friends. I think that they did an amazing job and they actually helped us win RecycleMania (last year the University of Ottawa beat the next group by less than 1%). So this year we of course have to do something to help get people into that recycling feeling again. I think that we might have found the perfect balance between awareness and social marketing. This year we are going to be working on the "Breaki...