A few weeks ago I was sitting in a meeting with my boss going over the business case for why the University of Ottawa should change our building standards to build green roofs whenever possible (meaning so long as the building can take the weight). The crux of the argument came down to two things... is it better for the planet and does it save costs? Wait, this is too far ahead, I need to go back a bit. A few months ago one of our awesome student employee created a wonderful business case about why the University of Ottawa should install green roofs on campus. She created a case that took into account of bunch of factors, including construction costs, energy savings, storm water management, operating costs, and much more. Ultimately, she came up with a very important finding... Over the life-cycle of a building, it always makes sense to install a green roof over a conventional roof. Wait wait, I guess I should actually start at the beginning. Last year I worked with the ...

Ever lose one of your favorite shoes and feel like it’s a shame to throw out the other one? Well you don’t have to! That lonely shoe can be recycled and made into fences, cutting boards, watering cans, and even benches. This is all done through a company called TerraCycle. They take many products that you would normally throw out and make them into something new. What I have been doing with the Office of Campus Sustainability for the past three days is cutting up people’s old shoes that have been donated to the Free Store . The shoes that don’t have a partner or are all worn out are cut so they can better fit in the box to send to TerraCycle , where they will turn them into new park benches. Cutting them up effectively doubles the amount of shoes that can fit in a box to be shipped. TerraCycle even makes it easy for you to send products to them by having pre-paid shipping labels that that be printed of their website. When they receive the product you have shipped them in the ...

When you think campus sustainability you might think that the solution is more trees or solar panels. What about a campus sound map, or a campus recyclopedia, or maybe a residence neighbourgoods program? Students in the first year Global Environmental Challenges course (ENV 1101B) recently handed in their poster projects for the semester. Their assignment... make the campus more sustainable in their own little way. This semester the course was taught by Dr. Sonia Wesche  who decided to work with the Office of Campus Sustainability through the Community Service Learning program in order to give students a chance to have the opportunity to do some hands on work to improve campus sustainability (yet another Living Laboratory project). And I can tell you that the students did not disappoint. Every project was amazing but I only have enough time to highlight a couple. Campus Noise Map Concept: Create a noise map of the campus that shows the highest levels of noise. ...

This semester the Office of Campus Sustainability partnered up with the ENV1101A course on a Community Service Learning Project. This isn't anything new because we do a project with this course every year... but this time, under the supervision of professor Tom Boggart, we mixed things up and had students work on mini sustainability projects. The change in format was to see what kind of innovation we could spark from the students if we tightened up some of the parameters. For instance, this year we gave the students a maximum budget of $1,000, limiting the scope and hopefully getting the students to think outside the box. We also had students produce a poster presentation rather than a formal report so that they could engage a more visual audience. So here are some of the results; they are spectacular. What impressed me the most were the really innovative things that people did to incorporate environmentally friendly design concepts into their posters. com...

And so we begin another round of Community Service Learning courses for the new academic year. Devotees of this blog will remember that we just posted our Annual Report for the Living lab and that we worked with over 500 students last year. This year we not going to be able to do anywhere near as many students, but we will still be working with a bunch. This semester alone, we will be working with 69 students across 6 courses. What are these projects you wonder? I am so glad you asked. A campus sustainability literacy survey - how much do people on our campus know about sustainability? A campus sustainability services survey - are the services we are offering cool or crappy? Sustainability micro projects - 20 small, simple, and affordable projects that could make our campus more sustainable Social justice / sustainability projects - track the life-cycle of a t-shirt and create a campus food map about where the food on campus comes from Case studies about our greatest susta...

Every year, students in the ENV 1101 course go about conducting surveys and collecting a massive amount of data about sustainability related activities on campus (all part of the Community Service Learning program). And every year, the Office of Campus Sustainability (mostly just Merissa actually), compiles that data and analyzes the results. There are many fun tidbits that we siphon from the data, including that this years findings seem to indicate that cycling is on the rise at the University of Ottawa. In our surveys we ask the very simple question "do you bike to campus?" and offer a variety of possible answers. In 2011, the number of people that "occasionally bike" or "always bike" was 25%. This year that number has risen to 31%. The largest increase was in the number of people who "always bike" to campus (rising from 7% in 2011 to 19% in 2012). Granted that these are self reported numbers and granted that the surveys are conducted by...

Welcome to our first ever Living Lab report. There are a couple of things I would like to highlight about the report and maybe one or two things I would like to say about where I see the program going. The Living Lab is not a novel concept. It is a program that is slowly being embraced by several universities around North America. The basic principle of the program is as follows Problems are identified in the community and on campus Students study the problems and propose solutions as part of their course work The University studies the proposals and implements the ideas that have the best chance of succeeding This is an incredibility simplistic view of what is in fact a very complicated open-innovation ecosystem. You can read this very technical Wikipedia entry if you want to dig deeper. What it boils down to is this... we have problems on campus and instead of burying them, we open them up for everyone to help solve. The only catch with us is that we focus ...

Let's talk about last summer. Last summer we inaugurated the community garden in its new space at 649 King Edward (that's right, we won the lottery with that space). It replaced the old location which has become the building footprint for the CAPEA building. Thirty five glorious plots to serve the campus community, not bad. But we already knew that we wouldn't have enough space to meet the demand of the campus and the Sandy Hill community. So while discussing the issue with the Director of Physical Resources Service , he mentioned how McGill University was toying around with the idea of having planters that could be moved around when needed. Mobile gardens... brilliant! So the group got together and we talked about want this could look like. We had a few ideas but unfortunately there were so many things to do to get our current community garden off the ground, that we quickly forgot about the mobile gardens idea. That is until an opportunity to look at them again ...

I want to make a bold statement and hopefully back it up with some observations. I think that not only is volunteering becoming more and more popular, but also that volunteering will help you succeed in life. Not only does it make you a better person, but it makes the University a better place. So why it is so hard to have a good volunteer experience. Over the past few days I have giving a couple of presentations about sustainability in various courses on campus. I have delivered presentations to a Natural Resources Management course and two introductions to Environment and Society courses (one in English and one in French). I have another course scheduled next week for Corporate Social Responsibility and last semester I presented to some environmental sciences and environmental studies courses. So why do I go and present in all these courses? Sure I sometimes like hearing my own voice, but the true reason I do it is harvest volunteers. My first year here on campus I had ab...

Photo credit: jonathan rausseo How would you like to help the environment, earn credentials, and learn some professional skills all in one week? The Centre for Global and Community Engagement (CGCS) recently approached our office with an interesting proposal, alternative study breaks. In short, take a student's boring reading week and turn it into an amazing learning experience with the end goal of making the campus more sustainable. In case you don't know who CGCE is, they are the group that operates the Community Service Learning program (you know... volunteer as part of your course work). They also run the co-curricular record and are basically a one-stop shop for volunteering on campus. So in the last little while, the CGCE got a lot of questions from students asking if there were more intense volunteering opportunities (you know.... a lot of intense volunteering in a short period of time). Then the idea was floated to do this during the reading week becau...