This is killing me. A couple of years ago I read about this lady at UBC who is magically able to make her office paperless - you can check out the article for yourself. Of course I become instantly green with envy (you like what I just did right there). I must have a paperless office too! I mean, if there is an office at the University of Ottawa that is going to be the first to become paperless.... why not our office? A couple of years later and reality of still kicking us in the gut. My desk is still a monument to paper. And so is everyone else's actually. There are a couple of hard truths that I have been ignoring. 1- I work with engineers and architects and so there is a whole lot of paper lovin' going on here (blueprints) 2- We don't have super modern equipment here... no I-Pads in every corner 3- Almost everyone here is over 50 so the ageist part of me wants to lay the blame on old school thinking Beyond that, there are also a couple of things that I ...

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...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo I've become a seasoned recycling veteran. I know what's made up of what, what it breaks down into, how it gets sorted, and what happens to it. On an industrial scale, it's actually amazing. The automatic recycling systems set in place in major Canadian cities is really impressive ( check out this video ), and we're more than equipped with what we need to recycle any and all plastic, paper, cardboard, metal, food, glass. When you really think about it, thats really all our waste is made up of, yet there's MOUNDS of garbage being produced every year. Why? Because the recycling industry doesn't matter if people don't recycle. For the last 3 weeks, all the bags recovered from the recycling stations in the Cafeteria have been thrown into the garbage. The staff has decided to give up on sorting them because the bins are so contaminated you can't even tell what they were supposed to house! Shredder and I have been collecting hands...

Photo Credit: Jonathan Rausseo I see garbage on the ground, I pick it up and put it in the trash. I drink an iced tea, I carry it until I see a recycling bin I see a light on and not in use, I turn in off I know we're both going to the same place, I carpool I don't agree with where my meat and produce comes from, I won't eat it I turn the lights off during Earth hour I know that something's in walking distance, I walk I see someone throw away a can when the recycling bin if five steps away, I get annoyed I have clothes that are too small for me, I donate them In my mind, I'm a pretty average guy, just tryin' to do my part. Apparently I'm a 'hardcore environmentalist'. For the longest time I didn't get it; the title really pissed me off. 'Not being a jerk when you don't have to be' is considered being 'hardcore'. But through the last month of Katimavik, living and co-operating with 10 other people and trying to make compromises...

Photo Credit: CBC Radio Jon and Bridget sat my partner Shredder and I down at the meeting table, and my mind was blown. We came in halfway through the meeting with no sort of context or lead in, so for the first bit I had no idea what was going on, but then they started talking about uPass. Now I'm not very familiar with the going ons of Ottawa yet (I've only been here a few times previous to living here) but it doesn't take a genius to see that Ottawa has a pretty damn intense bus system. Coming from a lifestyle where I owned a car and I lived in Calgary - a place where most non-drivers get around via subway - I was kinda daunted when I realised the only transit left available to me was the bus (or walking). And frankly, I gotta say that it doesn't make much sense that a city of 812 000 people (which is probably almost double that in tourists), isn't outfitted with a train system, as it'd be faster, more efficient, and the city's infrastructure is basical...