I don't think that I need to convince you that birds hitting windows and dying is a bad thing. Bird collisions with buildings is right at the top of the list of bird fatalities ( along with cats ), and with the huge decline of migratory birds in recent years, it makes sense that large institutions do what they can to help reduce collisions. So here is the first problem. There are no vertical transparent surfaces in nature, thus birds are completely unaware that they are about to hit a window. Birds are often confused because they see the reflection of a tree in the window and try to land on the tree. University campuses are usually covered in windows (modern buildings tend to have lots of windows to let in natural light and convey transparency... also they look cool). And, university campuses have a lot of trees. So mix these two things together and you get a lot of reflected trees causing bird collisions. The second problem has to do with the solutions, in that they are expensive....

Hey, so I think we need to talk. I guess you could sort of say that I’m asking you for a favour... Anyway, here it goes: The Office of Campus Sustainability is holding a couple of public consultations soon and you should definitely be involved. Okay I get it, but before you say no, hear me out. This year we’ve been running around, pumping out ideas. It’s a lot of work. Lately, we’ve been trying to get some attention from the uOttawa community. The office I am working with has been thinking about ways to get you to notice us and to make you happy because it really means a lot to us. Yes, we understand that Green Spaces are great but hey, we have a bunch of other issues as well that we want to put our efforts towards. Soooo, we started developing a sustainability plan as part of the new campus sustainability policy. Now, "what even is a Sustainability plan" you ask? Good question! We want uOttawa's sustainability plan to outline who we are, what our mission i...

This past week the University of Ottawa installed new exterior recycling bins on campus. Now I promised myself I wouldn't cry so please bare with me while I pay homage to the old bins before getting on to the new ones. I really liked the old exterior recycling bins that we had on campus. Yeah they had there short-comings; they broke really easily, they were separated bins (I'll talk about that I a minute), and quite frankly they weren't a very good design. But they also represented one of the first real risks that we took to improve recycling on campus. Unlike any bin before it, and unlike the new bins, the old bins were transparent, you could actually see right through them. I know this doesn't seem like anything new today, considering Toronto is littered with transparent bins, but when we installed those old bins on campus, to my knowledge we were the first in Ottawa. Of course the benefit of doing this is that the transparent bin forces people to put things i...

I recently moved into a new condo, a very easy decision for me to make as an environmentalist. Condos use less resources per capita than houses do and my condo is seeking a LEED Silver certification. There was only one sticking point... I wanted access to a backyard, which is tough for a condo. But I was lucky and bought a place with a big enough balcony that there are planters. So there I am, got my condo, got my sort of backyard, all I needed was some patio furniture. Here is where things get complicated, basically because of my brother. His advice was simple "What are you stupid? Don't buy your furniture now... wait until the end of the season and get a high quality patio set for a quarter of the price." And since I am broke now, this kind of made sense to me. But what do I do for the rest of the summer, sit on milk crates? Luckily Brigitte came to my rescue and shared a couple of sites with me about pallet furniture. This site is a pretty good representation o...

I’ve been working on the newsletter for a while now. Trying to make it sexy, easy to read and damn attractive. Besides lathering it in chocolate and honey (the obvious way to make anything attractive), I guess I could work on the design and the content. Move around the columns and rows. Add some flashy colours. Maybe I could add some weird content, for example: “Weird fact of the month: A gorilla can fart ten times louder than a human being”. Would that entice more people to read our newsletter? Or maybe I could do like Cosmo does and add a little corny love story at the bottom that will perpetually end with “to be continued”. If that still doesn't work, we could try a section called “Ten ways to crush compost”, for those who’d rather see old fruit explode. Why am I throwing out so many random ideas? Well, I find it difficult to tell if the content is interesting or not. The content is what I think will interest fellow students. But I don’t know what everyone else wan...