When you think campus sustainability you might think that the solution is more trees or solar panels. What about a campus sound map, or a campus recyclopedia, or maybe a residence neighbourgoods program? Students in the first year Global Environmental Challenges course (ENV 1101B) recently handed in their poster projects for the semester. Their assignment... make the campus more sustainable in their own little way. This semester the course was taught by Dr. Sonia Wesche  who decided to work with the Office of Campus Sustainability through the Community Service Learning program in order to give students a chance to have the opportunity to do some hands on work to improve campus sustainability (yet another Living Laboratory project). And I can tell you that the students did not disappoint. Every project was amazing but I only have enough time to highlight a couple. Campus Noise Map Concept: Create a noise map of the campus that shows the highest levels of noise. ...

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...

And so we begin another round of Community Service Learning courses for the new academic year. Devotees of this blog will remember that we just posted our Annual Report for the Living lab and that we worked with over 500 students last year. This year we not going to be able to do anywhere near as many students, but we will still be working with a bunch. This semester alone, we will be working with 69 students across 6 courses. What are these projects you wonder? I am so glad you asked. A campus sustainability literacy survey - how much do people on our campus know about sustainability? A campus sustainability services survey - are the services we are offering cool or crappy? Sustainability micro projects - 20 small, simple, and affordable projects that could make our campus more sustainable Social justice / sustainability projects - track the life-cycle of a t-shirt and create a campus food map about where the food on campus comes from Case studies about our greatest susta...

Welcome to our first ever Living Lab report. There are a couple of things I would like to highlight about the report and maybe one or two things I would like to say about where I see the program going. The Living Lab is not a novel concept. It is a program that is slowly being embraced by several universities around North America. The basic principle of the program is as follows Problems are identified in the community and on campus Students study the problems and propose solutions as part of their course work The University studies the proposals and implements the ideas that have the best chance of succeeding This is an incredibility simplistic view of what is in fact a very complicated open-innovation ecosystem. You can read this very technical Wikipedia entry if you want to dig deeper. What it boils down to is this... we have problems on campus and instead of burying them, we open them up for everyone to help solve. The only catch with us is that we focus ...

I want to make a bold statement and hopefully back it up with some observations. I think that not only is volunteering becoming more and more popular, but also that volunteering will help you succeed in life. Not only does it make you a better person, but it makes the University a better place. So why it is so hard to have a good volunteer experience. Over the past few days I have giving a couple of presentations about sustainability in various courses on campus. I have delivered presentations to a Natural Resources Management course and two introductions to Environment and Society courses (one in English and one in French). I have another course scheduled next week for Corporate Social Responsibility and last semester I presented to some environmental sciences and environmental studies courses. So why do I go and present in all these courses? Sure I sometimes like hearing my own voice, but the true reason I do it is harvest volunteers. My first year here on campus I had ab...

Photo cresdit: Jonathan Rausseo I am going to fold big concepts together here so please bare with me. Concept #1 - Living Laboratory I've talked about this before but a little refresher is in order. The Living Laboratory is a concept that places the University campus at the center of unique learning experiences. These learning experiences typically happen outside of the classroom and can be structured or unstructured. Concept#2 - Biodiversity zone A Biodiversity zone is at it's heart an area with a higher variation the the number of organisms. Simply put, more living things in a given space. So if I take these two concepts and bring them together then what we get is the Biodiversity Garden for the University of Ottawa. The concept of this project would be to create a small garden on campus with a disproportionately high amount of biodiversity. This would create a space that would not only increase the number of species on campus, it would also create a space where students in t...