It might be strange to think about this but often the most influential and impactful technology on campus tends to be older technology, especially when it comes to environmental sustainability. I was recently asked to speak at a course about Technology, Society, and the Environment. The idea behind inviting me was to speak to the group about how campus sustainability has been helped along by technology. I thought that I might share this list with you too so you could learn a bit about the new, the old, the unconventional, and the interesting technologies that helped shaped our campus over the past few years. The Living Wall One of the most popular pieces of technology is the University of Ottawa's living wall. In fact, the wall is not just a pretty assortment of 1500 plants, it is a biofilter which is being used to help filter the air inside the FSS Building. The wall helps cleanse 80-85% of the volatile compounds in the air  and it was also instrumental in helping soli...

Every once and a while we have the opportunity to do something wonderfully poetic. But before I get too far ahead of myself, which I often do, let's talk about Industrial Ecology. Rather than bore you with a technical definition of what it means, industrial ecology can be summed up by saying that the waste from one process becomes the food for another. And although this happens in nature all the time, industrial ecology focuses on when this happens in an industrial setting. Take for example meat processing plants that often sell the undesirable parts of the animals to pet food suppliers. Okay, maybe not my best example but it is true. Or how about lumber producers that take excess wood shavings to make paper. There are many examples of how the waste from one process can kick start another. Being a sustainability person, you can imagine how happy I get when industrial ecology happens here on campus.So here is that little bit of wonderful that I elud...