When faced with the task of furnishing the empty space in her research lab, uOttawa linguistics professor Tania Zamuner turned to the university’s Furniture Reuse Program, which transplants gently used office furnishings from one part of campus to another. Photo by  Tania Zamuner Program coordinator Alex Forest gave Prof. Zamuner a tour of the warehouse, and was able to connect her with a set of desks, hutches and chairs that are in mint condition. You’d never know they weren’t brand new, and now Prof. Zamuner’s graduate and undergraduate students have a comfortable and functional space to work. “I'm very pleased with the results,” says Prof. Zamuner. “Since adding the furniture, the lab is constantly full with students and my research is moving forward because there is a common area from which students are working and collaborating.” Moreover, the furniture was provided for free, saving Prof. Zamuner and the Centre for Child Language Research approximately $10,712.03 ...

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...

Photo credit: unknown I realize as September begins and students move into residence and new apartments that this saying is forgotten. The feelings of new beginnings overwhelm us and we decide to rid ourselves of last year’s Ikea furniture (because hey, we are getting the largest store in North America!) and make room for the new. I spent a chunk of this morning pulling “junk” from a dumpster in front of Brooks residence complex with the reward of saving numerous cardboard boxes from the trash along with two mirrors, a shelving unit and a few other assorted goods. My first question/cry of outrage was, “Who in their right mind throws out a perfectly intact full-length mirror?” The response I received from Jon and Brigitte was that students that are moving just don’t know what to do with these things. I already knew this, after seeing the tonnes of material we saved from being tossed (and instead donated to local charities) but, still! I look around my room with a sense of pride- ...

Photo credit: Merissa Mueller Summer is drawing to a close and as the hours on my banking excel sheet dwindle, it seems like a good idea to summarize the projects I have worked on this summer. After all, for all you know I have been sitting at this desk watching The Mentalist and Lie to Me, twiddling my thumbs (which I did do, for a week actually- more on that later). I began my summer with data crunching. I sat in front of my computer staring at piles of data that was gathered by Eric Crighton’s first year Global Environmental Challenges class and compiling it into more useful information with the aid of pivot tables. The finished product was produced by Jon because of his talent with infographics. I also spent some of my time reviewing last year’s surveys and fixing them up to be more geographically correct (thank you, methods courses) for Crighton’s next year class. On campus we have a board entitled the “ SUDCOM ” or Sustainable Development Committee that oversees various...

Photo Credit: Jonathan Rausseo As a child, this message was ingrained in my brain from the time I was able to understand what a blue box was for and to this day it has been repeated over and over, especially since I began my job here at the Sustainability Office on Campus. However, it has taken on a different meaning than when I was a child because I am no longer focused on which bin should my juice carton go in, in fact, I am not focused as much on recycling at all. It started way back during Recycle Mania when our Waste Diversion Coordinator decided to go waste free for the entirety of the competition. This brought up some important messages from previous courses including “life cycle analysis” which focuses on the environmental impact from the creation to the disposal of a product. Brigitte was concerned about the end point of her products, where her waste would go and how she could REDUCE her impact. After trying waste free for a week and picking up the book “No Impact Man” by Coli...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo Consider, for a moment, the average day of the average office worker...the desks that must accommodate him...the wheelie chairs he must sit in...the counters he must splay things on...the phones he must answer...the cabinets he must put files in...the cupboards he must open....Have the picture? That's what's needed to sustain 1 office worker. Now let's do some multiplication. How many office workers are there per office? How many offices are there per floor? How many floors are there per building? How many buildings are there per district? How many districts are there per city? How many cities are there on the Earth? Granted, the numbers vary a lot from to city-to-city to district-to-district to building-to-building to floor-to-floor to office-to-office to office-worker-to-office-worker. But multiplying seven numbers together, regardless of how small they are originally, is usually going to have a huge result. Considering the fact that 25 citi...

I was rencently flipping through the uOttawa ‘Research Perspectives’ magazine, and I came across a familiar face. Dr. Variola, a biomedical engineer chose a recyclied desk (the one in the picture) from our recycled furniture program. Each year, we renovate and optimize spaces around campus; which send an unbeleivable amount of furniture to landfill. This furniture is usually in perfect condition, was very expensive (the average workstation with filing cabinet and task chair has a price tag of about $2,200), and may only be a year old. A few years ago, we decided to start a program to collect this furniture, and offer it to other depatments on campus (rather than buying the same things). If a department or University service needs to get rid of their furniture, we get it transferred to our storage, where it is sorted and put on display for future university employees. If a university employee is in need of a specific piece of furniture, they come by and choose what would be best for th...

Photo credit: Jon Rausseo When furniture reaches its expiry date, or simply doesn’t fit a space anymore, what do you do? Throwing it out is a waste of perfectly good furniture, but who has the time to dismantle countless pieces and recycle them, especially if the units can be reused? That is where we come in. Our furniture recycling program takes undesired furniture from all over campus and tries to find a new home for it! In the interim, the furniture gets stored at 200 Lees, where I lurk with a clipboard and pen, desperately trying to create a wonderful inventory system for it. Currently, the system follows the come-by-and-see method, usually followed by okay-let’s-find-a-matching-chair-and/or-table. What I am aiming to do is create a method to our madness, and make this furniture recycling program into something more. We want the rooms that the items are stored in to eventually look like showroom floors: well-organized, well-labelled and tidy. That end product is still floating on t...