This year marks the 4th year of being a bottled water free campus for the University of Ottawa . I can't say that there was a lot of opposition to the idea but now that a few years have passed, it seems like the campus has embraced being bottled water free. I won't make it seem like there is unanimous adoption. Every once and a while I will walk by an event that is handing out a bottle or two and think to myself that I should send a letter or something. But, in my mind, the biggest win from the bottled water free campaign is the improvement of the water fountains on campus. As a condition to becoming bottled water free, Physical Resources Service has invested $75,000 every year into improving the fountains on campus and adding new fountains. Don't take my word for it, every year our office produces a report to monitor the state of the water fountains on campus. The fountains are checked for 7 dimensions of quality; taste, temperature, water pressure, accessibili...

Book worms at the University of Ottawa rejoice! You will be happy to know that you can continue to study at the library and be perfectly at ease with the fact that the library is using less energy. Admittedly energy consumption and libraries don't typically go hand in hand but they should. Did you know that library are energy pigs. Think about it, lots of people that need fresh air circulated around and books that can't get too dry or too wet or they risk being damaged. Finding that balance takes a whole bunch of energy. So today I thought I would share with you some good news from our EcoProsperity program. Now for those of you who don't know, the uOttawa EcoProsperity program is just a fancy name we have given to our energy savings program. Essentially we are going around to every building on campus and trying to make it more efficient. This past year the engineers and operations people at Physical Resources Service have been working to see what they could do t...

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 ...