Hi, I’m Mégane, the Sustainability and Lost and Found clerk working for the Office of Campus Sustainability this summer! The Lost and Found has gone from being managed by the University’s Protection Services to the Office of Campus Sustainability. Since I started on May 1st, we’ve already made a lot of changes to improve the efficiency of the Lost and Found. Any changes going forward will incorporate sustainability as this is now a core value of the Lost and Found.   The Lost and Found is located in the UCU, room 02A (near the bookstore). It is open and you can stop by on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 9:30 AM – 12:00 PM and 12:30 PM - 3:00 PM for the summer. During my first week of work, I spent a lot of time going through bulk bags of lost item scattered across the room, waiting to be catalogued. Slowly but surely, the room has started to feel less claustrophobic as more light could reach the den of lost treasures. I was feeling good about myself, well at lea...

In their 2008 progress report, the China Council for International Cooperation on Environmental Development defined the circular economy as " a generic term for the reducing, reusing and recycling activities conducted in the process of production, circulation, and consumption " (CCICED, 2008). In the 1990s, the term "Circular Economy" was popularized in China, stemming from rapid economic growth and subsequent strain on the country's natural resources. The principle of a circular economy is to capitalize on the recycling/reuse of raw materials while balancing natural resource use with economic growth. Although definitions of circular economy are relatively modern, the fundamentals of the circular economy have been around since before the industrial revolution.   Examples of a circular economy in Ottawa are second-hand stores such as Value Village. The role of thrift stores in promoting reuse is essential. Buying clothing second-hand is an efficient way to pr...

 August 30th is the first and biggest pop-up  Free Store of the year. I guess the best way to explain it is like this... imagine your birthday and Christmas decided to have a coffee date, at the end of the summer, under a giant tent, just before you started your university semester... that's basically what this event is. Now whether you have been to the Free Store before or if you have never been to the Free Store, it is absolutely worth coming out to this event. Here's why... More stuff You will see more things at this event than you normally get to see at the Free Store. The event is being held under the tent in front of FSS specifically so that we can accommodate more people. At the Free Store, we can usually have about 20-30 people max inside the space at any given time. Last year when we hosted this event, we had hundreds of people at the event at any given time. We estimate over 2,000 people attended and over 5,000 kilograms of stuff was given away. More...

The new Free Store is up and running and so far it is turning out to be a great success. Every day we bring another 10 boxes or so to the store and they are gone before the store closes. Funny thing though, no matter how much stuff we bring, there is always a hundred times more stuff waiting for us in our storage rooms. Sometimes it feels like a battle that can't be won. When you are trying to reduce the amount of things people consume, there is a tidal wave of entrenched conditioning to overcome. Think about it; every commercial is designed to get you to want something new. The first day of school means you need a new outfit. Going to a wedding means buying a new outfit. Want to take up yoga? New outfit. Want to turn over a new leaf.... new stuff is needed for that too. It seems that every time you want to do something new or different, or if want to mark an occasion or celebrate something, there is an understanding that a purchase is in order. And in case you aren't co...

Something pretty big is on the way and we think that you should be excited about it. The Free Store at the University of Ottawa is undergoing a change, or maybe a better way to say it is an evolution. But this evolution comes at a cost and before the end of this blog post, I am going to try to give you such a compelling argument that you will want to help us pay this cost. Because what comes afterwards might be the most fundamental shift in the way you deal with waste in a generation. Now that I have the hype out of the way, let's talk a little about history. uOttawa's Free Store was born from the dream of a place that could never really exist. It was a concept or an idea that people whispered about; more of an urban myth than an actual place. Think about it... a store where everything is free. What does that even mean? How could it sustain itself without an income? When I was a student back in the early 2000's, I had heard that there was a Free Store over at Carlet...

So I got a lot of comments on my first post about going waste free. Thanks to everyone for all the questions and ideas. I think that the one that kept surfacing the most was around the theme of what is zero waste actually? I thought maybe this would be a great place to start the next installment of this series... If we want to be zero waste, well... "what is waste?" seems like a great place to start. If you have ever had the misfortune of attending one of my presentations you might remember me saying that there is no such thing as waste. This is technically true but not quite practically true. Take Bill Gates and his project to recycle nuclear waste . I think that we could all agree that nuclear waste is pretty high on the list of "difficult things to recycle"... but it is not impossible to recycle or reuse, nothing is given enough time and money. But we aren't really interested in fringe waste, we are interested in the everyday stuff like gum wrappers...