Do you hear that future inhabitants of Thompson Residence? It is a call to arms, a call to mobilize your waste and make a better world one recyclable at a time. Sorry for the touch of over-dramaticism but this is something that has bugged me since I arrived at the University of Ottawa... the lack of recycling in residences. The recycling system in the uOttawa residences is not the same as the rest of the campus. There are a couple of reasons why this is the case (different cleaning contracts, less infrastructure, etc) but the primary reason is the nature of the waste that exists in residences. Think about, the people in residences live there so they generate a whole bunch of waste that you just don't when you are on campus for only a couple of hours a day. When is the last time you had to throw out a razor or dental floss or an old t-shirt on campus? Probably never if you didn't live in one of the University's residences. So you can easily see the challenges of recy...

This past week the University of Ottawa installed new exterior recycling bins on campus. Now I promised myself I wouldn't cry so please bare with me while I pay homage to the old bins before getting on to the new ones. I really liked the old exterior recycling bins that we had on campus. Yeah they had there short-comings; they broke really easily, they were separated bins (I'll talk about that I a minute), and quite frankly they weren't a very good design. But they also represented one of the first real risks that we took to improve recycling on campus. Unlike any bin before it, and unlike the new bins, the old bins were transparent, you could actually see right through them. I know this doesn't seem like anything new today, considering Toronto is littered with transparent bins, but when we installed those old bins on campus, to my knowledge we were the first in Ottawa. Of course the benefit of doing this is that the transparent bin forces people to put things i...

Jon has proposed a one-week waste free challenge for my next post. I secretly want to refuse, but my childhood shrieks to my parents of “What about the whales!” echo in my head. Instead I ask for a guide and am provided with this: http://www.sustainable.uottawa.ca/recycling.html . Realize quickly that this guide still allows for waste and ask for clarification on ‘contaminated papers’ and dental floss. Turns out floss is a plastic (good to know) and ‘contaminated papers’, which I assume also include used tissue (cleverly polite guide!), are compost. Realize the location of my city-issued compost bin is unknown to me. Decide that starting a waste free challenge at 11pm on a Sunday is not ideal as it would mean riffling through my garage in -20 to find my green bin. Also, procrastination is fun. And the week always starts on a Monday, right? Commit to waste free week. Starting tomorrow. Day 1 : Have decided to approach my waste free week by going on the offensive. If I don’t cre...

Photo credit: Marie Yassa The day has finally arrived. The mother of all recycling counters is now up and fully operational in the UCU Cafeteria. And if things work out the way they are supposed to, this could be a game changer for recycling on campus. So let me give you a little insight as to how things used to be. The cafeteria use to house about 8 small recycling counters that were scattered around the space. There have been problems for years with contamination, and this was further compounded by the fact that the cafeteria is likely the single largest source of waste production on campus. So what have we done to change the situation and make it better? All the bins are now centralized into one location with a MEGA counter. This helps concentrate our resources, requires fewer materials (bins), makes it easier for staff to clean up, and liberates more space in the caf. The counter has much larger bins that take more waste. This means that there will b...

I mentioned in a previous post that recycling is a question of convenience. This isn’t the case all the time but I am willing to bet that you aren’t even aware of a tenth of the waste decisions you make in your daily life. When I was a kid in grade school a group of older students from some random high school came into my class to give a presentation about recycling. The details are fuzzy now but I do recall that when I got home that night I pestered my mom about recycling and how important it is. “Police should force everyone to recycle” I declared to my mother as I half-scowled at her for not having a recycling bin in our apartment. What I didn’t understand is that not only did my mother come from a different generation with different mentalities and norms about recycling, but also that we lived in an apartment building and recycling was not offered. What never dawned on me at that age and likely still evades many people today is that recycling is a matter of convenience plain and si...

While I was a student here I was always extremely disappointed with the recycling system. Of course I never really had a complete picture of everything that was going on. I never knew about the initiation of a recycling program on campus in 1992; I never knew about the night crews that collect and sort waste; and I certainly didn’t know about the politics behind recycling bins. There is so much more to the story than you think and I want to share a little bit about our experience so that others can profit and make the proverbial “better mouse trap”. The title of this little series is ‘building a better bin’ and it is called such because in the pursuit of creating a more responsible society I believe that we can start with a better recycling bin. Our story begins back in 2007 when the University of Ottawa was going through a little bit of a rough patch with regards to green public relations. The Globe and Mail publishes an annual survey about how student perceive the environmental initi...