Are you anxious about the new school year? Muggy Mondays has just the thing to make your Monday (and Wednesday) mornings a little bit better! Muggy Mondays offers FREE fair trade coffee, tea, and hot chocolate to anyone who brings a reusable mug. In fact, we gave out 2,289 cups last year! Believe me when I say tremendous effort and love goes into each and every cup of coffee, tea, and hot chocolate we serve. Allow me to pass along just a snapshot of the passion that goes into each mug: VOLUNTEERS Muggy Monday volunteers are small in number, but big in heart. Most of our volunteers don't even drink coffee, seriously like only a quarter of them do, but they still arrive at 7:30am to prepare everything – and they do it with a smile! Their positive attitude will cheer you up even on the darkest and coldest mornings! Interested in volunteering? E-mail us at muggymondaysclub@gmail.com COFFEE All good coffee begins with the beans! Kicking Horse Coffee roasts only the best sh...

So in the world of scary news we have some developments over in the Fauteux building. It turns out that not all buildings on campus are created equally. You would think that every building produces about the same amount of waste on a per capita basis (waste per person). Not so it would seem. Brigitte Morin, our waste diversion coordinator, just completed an evaluation of the waste coming out of the Fauteux building and compare it to the Lamoureux building. The results... Fauteux generates about 4 times more waste than Lamoureux. This brings up a tonne of questions. First, can these two buildings actually be compared. Well it turns out that the Fauteux building is only about 5% biger than Lamoureux; both buildings have a cafeteria; both buildings host tonnes of events; both buildings host professional programs. So on the surface it seems like the two buildings are pretty similar. The second question, do lawyers inherently create more waste than than teachers? This one is a little less s...

What is a waste audit? Well my friends, a waste audit is when we organize the collection of all the waste and recycling from a given space (all the bags are labeled by room and waste type i.e. recycling mixed papers room 229), and we evaluate the contents of each bag. Each bag is opened and the items inside are separated by type (mixed papers, waste, etc.) and weighed. With the information noted during the waste audit, we can calculate the contamination rate of each bag, and of the whole building (i.e. the percentage of items which were in the wrong receptacle). We can then study trends in the data; for example, if people are often throwing a specific item in the wrong bin it is perhaps because the bin isn’t labeled properly, or the sings aren’t clear enough. Recently, we completed a waste audit of the entire Fauteux building, and here are the results: 32% of what was found in each bag was considered to be some type of contamination (which is above what is usual for campus buildings…)....

Qu’est-ce qu’une vérification de déchets ? Bien les ami(e)s, une vérification de déchets est lorsqu’on organise la collecte de déchets et recyclage (tout identifié par type et endroit ex. recyclage de papier, comptoir de recyclage devant salle 323) d’un endroit, lors d’une période de temps et que l’on évalue ce qu’il y a à l’intérieur de chaque sac. Chaque sac est ouverts et les articles sont triés et pesés par type (papier, déchets, etc.). Avec toutes les quantités notées nous pouvons calculer le taux de contamination de chaque sac, c'est-à-dire, le pourcentage des articles qui ne devraient pas être dans ce sac (ex. des déchets dans le réceptacle pour le métal/plastique/verre). On peut par la suite étudier les résultats et trouver des tendances ; Si par exemple tout le monde jette un article recyclable en particulier c’est peut-être parce que ce n’est pas bien indiqué sur les affiches ! Récemment, nous avons compléter une vérification de déchets de l’édifice Fauteux en entier, et...

Check out this post from an anonymous campus community forced to do a waste audit... The amount of coffee cups contaminated at Fauteux Hall, in the Faculty of Law building, is shocking and depressing. How difficult can it be to properly empty out the left-over coffee from the cups and throw them in the correct bin? It may mean nothing to you but it means the world for the person sorting out these cups. Everyone complains about the environment, but some people still don’t recycle properly on campus. Wondering what happens to your coffee cups after you are done drinking? I bet you’d say they are recycled, right?! That's true, except, many coffee cups still end up in landfills. Most coffee cups processed for recycling still have lots of coffee in them because people don’t throw out what’s left, which unfortunately contaminates the cups. The contaminated cups—where the coffee liquid has deeply penetrated the layer of the coffee cups— end up in garbage bags destined for landfills while ...