The Sustainabilitree

Coca-cola helped popularize the modern image of Santa Clause... they didn't invent it but they used it to great effect to help sell their product and forever link Christmas and Coca-Cola. Every year our office participates in something known as the Alternative Student Break (ASB) . This activity gives students the opportunity to do a full semester of volunteer work in just one week. During the winter semester, we give a workshop about concepts related to waste and then we do a waste audit to see how the campus is doing. This past month we experimented with a new topic... anti-consumption! This idea came to us as we debated the topic of whether it was a bad thing that the Free Store was promoting the idea of consumption... which means consuming more resources. I won't spoil the entire workshop but I am going to give you a breakdown of what we did and what we discovered. The Workshop Our first day was spent going over the concepts of consumption, consumerism, and marketing. Ess...

In my previous post, I explained what NOT to bring to residence and gave the advice to be as much of a minimalist as possible. Now, I will explain what you should think of when considering what to bring to residence. Going into residence, one thing to remember is, as much as possible, to buy used items. After all, things break or get lost in the transition of moving between residences. Or maybe your roommate might even leave with your oven mitts (that might be my own personal experiences talking there). Instead of wasting your money on buying a bunch of items that will be lost by the time you graduate, buy second hand items - it's much cheaper and better for the environment! I've seen a lot of great, affordable items on Facebook Marketplace, furniture, décor, kitchenware, rugs, you name it, you can probably find it there for at least half the price of what you would pay in store. Better yet, go through your house and look through items with your family to see what they no longe...

So, you’re moving into residence and wondering what you should bring. Well, this is your lucky day as I, someone who has lived in residence for two years, am going to tell you what NOT to bother bringing to campus. First tip to keep in mind when packing is that you need to limit how much you should bring of everything because you are working with a small space and limited storage. Here are the most important things not to bring: Too Many Clothes I know, it seems silly! You can never have too many clothes, but it just means that students need to be conscientious of what they bring. If you’re like me, you’ll probably end up shopping at the Rideau Centre more than once and leave with more clothes than you planned, trying to make it fit in the small closet. Clothes you shouldn’t bother bringing from home are ones for special occasions like fancy dresses (how often do resident students go to fancy events?) or clothes that don’t match. These will just take space in your closet that ...

Hi, I’m Mégane, the Sustainability and Lost and Found clerk working for the Office of Campus Sustainability this summer! The Lost and Found has gone from being managed by the University’s Protection Services to the Office of Campus Sustainability. Since I started on May 1st, we’ve already made a lot of changes to improve the efficiency of the Lost and Found. Any changes going forward will incorporate sustainability as this is now a core value of the Lost and Found.   The Lost and Found is located in the UCU, room 02A (near the bookstore). It is open and you can stop by on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 9:30 AM – 12:00 PM and 12:30 PM - 3:00 PM for the summer. During my first week of work, I spent a lot of time going through bulk bags of lost item scattered across the room, waiting to be catalogued. Slowly but surely, the room has started to feel less claustrophobic as more light could reach the den of lost treasures. I was feeling good about myself, well at lea...

One of the most important days for the Office of Campus Sustainability is the Dump and Run. As students move out of residence and summer arrives, many simply leave what they no longer wish to keep in their old rooms. Some leave them in the temporary donation bins left by our office, but most don’t know what happens to the items left behind. This event saves thousands of discarded items from being thrown out and instead, breathes new life into them by giving them the opportunity to be reused. The huge amount of wasted items saved is then sent to the Free Store where students and members of the community can take these second-hand items that are often still perfectly good and give them a new home. Some of the most common items found in the Dump and Run and in the Free Store can be very useful to students, especially those living in residence. These include kitchen appliances like pots, plates, utensils, and wooden spoons, home appliances (we’ve even gotten a vacuum and a great looking co...

Wait wait, before we get started, you can check out our uOttawa move-out guide for those living in residences! I know I know... final projects are due, papers need to be handed in, and exams are getting started. So the last thing on your mind is how to be sustainable when all this is done and you head home for the summer. But, like many things in life,  little bit of planning can go a long way. So by taking just a hot second to look over this list, you can do some real good for the planet and your community. So this list isn't going to focus on how you travel (although if you are travelling under 500 km, consider the train instead of the plane), instead it is going to focus on what to do with all the stuff you accumulated and can't take with you when you leave. Yes, we all sometimes get more stuff then we need... no judgement here. This list will help you figure out the best way to get that stuff out into the world so it can help others. Now one option you can consider before ...

It's a tale as old as time... you're coming to campus for the first time and you aren't sure what to bring with you. Well fear not, we have a handy dandy list of the things that you might not want to bring with you when you come to campus. This will save you a bunch of space in your suitcases and bags, making your life on campus a little bit easier. Although this is not as exhaustive list, we have some of the big things listed here. And of course if you aren't sure about a particular item, feel free to reach out to us for more info. Printer It can be very tempting to think that lugging that big printer  from home is a good idea... trust me it isn't. It's very rare that you will actually need to print any of your assignments, most are submitted electronically. And if you do need to print something, there are hundreds of printers on campus that you can use almost 24/7. Board games / video games I am not saying don't play board games and video games, what I am...

You can't imagine how many emails we get these days asking about the Free Store. Can we still drop off donations, when will the store open, what are you doing about COVID, etc... Well let's dive into some of those questions so that our community has a better idea of what is happening with the Store. In March, the Free Store experienced the beginning of the COVID crisis like everyone. News was starting to float around about the virus; some places were thinking of closing; should we close too? Just as the NBA decided to shut down, the Free Store decided that we didn't want to put people at risk and we closed our doors, uncertain about how long the pandemic would last. Fast-forward to July and the holding pattern for businesses was loosening up. At that point we decided to put together a plan that would allow operations at the Free Store to get going again. How could we not? We were getting messages every day asking about the store and how people could get access.  The Free St...

Sometimes it can feel like a huge weight is pushing down on your chest. You hear about the impending doom of climate change but it doesn't seem like people are concerned. Every day you see people acting like it's all cool. Instagram photos from a secluded beach, or a delectable steak dinner, or a mini shopping spree... air travel, red meat, consumerism. I mean the Amazon is literally burning and all your friends are doing is wondering if you are up for a pub crawl on Friday. That feeling you are experiencing, that weight on your chest, is what people are starting to call climate anxiety. It is a recent phenomenon, although we can hardly say that anxiety is something new. What has really changed lately is the constant reporting on climate related issues. On one side, it is great that people are learning more about climate change and wanting to take action. But on the other hand, people are starting to confront the difficulty of the task at hand and it is admittedly pretty t...

 August 30th is the first and biggest pop-up  Free Store of the year. I guess the best way to explain it is like this... imagine your birthday and Christmas decided to have a coffee date, at the end of the summer, under a giant tent, just before you started your university semester... that's basically what this event is. Now whether you have been to the Free Store before or if you have never been to the Free Store, it is absolutely worth coming out to this event. Here's why... More stuff You will see more things at this event than you normally get to see at the Free Store. The event is being held under the tent in front of FSS specifically so that we can accommodate more people. At the Free Store, we can usually have about 20-30 people max inside the space at any given time. Last year when we hosted this event, we had hundreds of people at the event at any given time. We estimate over 2,000 people attended and over 5,000 kilograms of stuff was given away. More...

A three-part series brought to you by us, sharing note-worthy tips and tricks on shopping smart, reducing your textile waste footprint PLUS, how to find sustainable brands! Unfortunately, the fashion industry was not built by green thumbs.  Planetaid.org reports that “clothes can take up to 40 years to decompose.” We are taught to buy anything and everything we might need, which results in over-consumption. So let’s prevent things from piling up! If clutter, wasted money, and outdated clothing describes your current situation, then stay tuned! DO YOUR RESEARCH Research the companies you’re going to shop from. Know what their values are as a corporation in order to support ethical practices . Most major clothing brands are starting to develop collections that have “sustainable”characteristics - but don’t be fooled, major clothing brands like these are still considered “fast fashion” companies, most likely still partake in unethical behaviours such as sweatshops and unfai...

Today is another day... wake up, brush my teeth, get to the University, spend the rest of the day emptying out the Free Store donation bin. Monday, empty the bin. Tuesday, empty the bin. Wednesday, open the Free Store... then empty the bin. Thursday, empty the bin. Friday, empty the bin. You're seeing the pattern right? This is something we are seeing at the Free Store this summer. We used to fill up the donation bin once a week, now it is once a day. We are getting record amounts of donations, which is great from a waste reduction point of view, but horrible from a resource requirement point of view. Put simply, it takes too much time to sort and clean all the new donations. We've spent some time trying to figure out what's happening (why are we getting so many donations) and we have come up with a few theories. Online shopping is taking off and that means a lot of purchases made were for things that didn't fit properly, or were passing flights of fancy...