For those who are plugged into the zeitgeist, the number 10,000 probably has a lot of significance. The 10,000 hour rule is a controversial idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. 10,000 steps means that you are on your way to a healthy level of fitness. At 10,000 feet you gain enough perspective to see the big picture. But I think that one of the most import things is that it is preceded by 9,999, which as we can all agree is a pretty big number. A decade ago our office came across a really startling statistic... every day on campus 6,500 disposable cups were being used. We figured out a bunch of different ways of representing what 6,500 disposable coffee cups means... if you stacked them end to end it would be 7 times the height of the peace tower, they could fill up 10 tennis courts, it is the equivalent weight of 125 basket balls... etc. For the longest time we kept talking to people about what a huge number this was. The concept that our simple little campus ...

Wow, it really really feels like you don't like disposable coffee cups! In the past couple of weeks I have been getting an avalanche of questions about the infamous Nescafé booth which was on campus during the month of September. I guess the whole story goes something like this. Nescafé is invited by Community Life on campus for an event last year... Things go so well they are invited back for Welcome Week this year. Nescafé hands out heaping cups of coffee to anyone who stops by their booth. Things are going well again until... an infographic comes out announcing how many cups of coffee were handed out over the month. There is a flood of comments on a Facebook post about the coffee being handed out. The post is taken down and Coffegedgon begins... I say the whole thing goes "something like this" because our office was not involved with the event. We just got a couple of sneers and complaints sent our way but we didn't pay much attention to everything h...

The inspiration for this blog came to me yesterday as a couple of students and I were discussing their Living Lab project during our weekly meetings. The group is working on figuring out the percentage of disposable vs reusable mugs used on campus. The numbers aren't great and so group has been doing some discrete surveillance around the campus to see if the reusable mug use is on the rise. Spoiler alert... the numbers still don't look great. Somewhere in the realm of 5%. A very interesting question was asked by one of the volunteers. He wanted to know if he had to count Tim Horton cups twice. I was a little perplexed..., "Why would you count them twice", I asked. "Well" he responded, "everyone gets two cups instead one so that they don't burn their hands". Sooooooooooooo, can you see the problem with this? Tim Horton is the only place I know of that has not embraced the little cardboard sleeve that all other coffee chains use on thei...

"Knock knock" "Who's there?" "Green rep" "Green Rep who?" "No seriously dude, turn off the light when you go to bed. You're wasting energy. And while you're at it, milk cartons go into the plastics recycling bin... not the paper one." They say that university is one of the big turning points in life. While in university you will likely pick up a lot of the habits and skills that you will carry with for the rest of your life. Fact checking and proper sourcing for sure, but what about those habits that will help our society become more sustainable? There are a tonne of environmental issues out there. I could dedicate the rest of this blog post to them and you wouldn't finish reading until early tomorrow morning. But I can sum up the majority of them with two simple words, 'resource consumption'. The more stuff you use, the more stuff we need to make, the more resources get drained, etc. But did you k...

It is that time of the year again, when millions of Canadians hold their breath, squeeze all their hopes into the pit of their stomachs, and roll up the rim to see if they win. The problem is that the only thing we are actually winning is a crappier planet. Roll up the Rim to Win has been the bane of my existence for the past decade. The University of Ottawa, like every other University, has a disposable cup problem: there are too many of them to put a fine point to it. Many, if not the majority of disposable coffee cups, are tossed directly into the garbage on campus. There is a general misconception that coffee cups are covered with so much wax that they can’t be recycled (I can’t blame anyone, what is that stuff on the inside of the cup that is super shinny and stops water from leaking out of it?). Otherwise, people understand that you can recycle them and they do just that... except that they do it while the cup is still half full of coffee. That means that the coffee so...

Jon has proposed a one-week waste free challenge for my next post. I secretly want to refuse, but my childhood shrieks to my parents of “What about the whales!” echo in my head. Instead I ask for a guide and am provided with this: http://www.sustainable.uottawa.ca/recycling.html . Realize quickly that this guide still allows for waste and ask for clarification on ‘contaminated papers’ and dental floss. Turns out floss is a plastic (good to know) and ‘contaminated papers’, which I assume also include used tissue (cleverly polite guide!), are compost. Realize the location of my city-issued compost bin is unknown to me. Decide that starting a waste free challenge at 11pm on a Sunday is not ideal as it would mean riffling through my garage in -20 to find my green bin. Also, procrastination is fun. And the week always starts on a Monday, right? Commit to waste free week. Starting tomorrow. Day 1 : Have decided to approach my waste free week by going on the offensive. If I don’t cre...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo About 3 years ago the Brige (our waste diversion coordinator) found out that we use about 6,500 disposable coffee mugs on campus every day. If we stacked those mugs end to end, those mugs would be 7 times higher than the Peace Tower of the parliament building. Stacked side to side that would be enough coffee cups to cover ten tennis courts. Now it has been a couple of years since we checked up on the number of disposable coffee mugs used on campus daily but the odds are that this number has gone up. So what's the solution? How can we get people to use fewer disposable mugs? First thing to do is to flip the question on it's head. Why would people want to use a disposable mug? Well it turns out that there are many reasons. For one, all the disposable mugs are branded. That means there is an associated status that goes along with the cup. You know... that really expensive logo that indicates that you are better than all those other doops that...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo Another semester means another edition of Muggy Mondays. For those of you not in the know, Muggy Mondays is a waste reduction initiative targeted at behavioural modification with respects to habitual use of reusable containers by applying a reward mechanism. Simply said, on Mondays we give away free coffee if you have a reusable mug. And not just coffee, hot chocolate and tea too. Muggy Mondays is originally a program that was introduced at uOttawa by Green Campus. Technically we ... borrowed the idea from the University of Guelph (shout out to my green peeps at the UofG sustainability office). It has been running on campus now for 6 years if I recall correctly. The concept of free coffee isn't anything new. Many groups use free coffee as a means to pull people in. The trick with Muggy Mondays is that there are no strings attached (with the exception of having your own mug). The condition component of this program is simple.... good things happen whe...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo So long as something 'guaranteed' by a company/product is not written in clear, factual letters or official, governmentally issued symbols (Such as the plastic 1-7 recycling sign), you can pretty safely assume that assuming anything about them is a bad idea. A prime example of this is the "Respect the Environment" text written on the bottom of a Tim Horton's coffee cup, or the fact that there is a picture of a Tim Horton's cup on the 'paper' section of Tim Horton's waste stations. Is the Tim Horton's coffee cup recyclable? TECHNICALLY the answer is yes. TECHNICALLY, if coffee HASN'T BEEN POURED INTO THE CUP YET, the cup is paper recyclable. But the moment coffee has been poured into a disposable cup, it stains the inner edge of the cup and makes it damp and completely useless. On top of that, if any coffee is left in the cup when it's disposed (Which is all too common a happenstance for our disgustingly wa...