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Water Water Everywhere!

This year marks the 4th year of being a bottled water free campus for the University of Ottawa . I can't say that there was a lot of opposition to the idea but now that a few years have passed, it seems like the campus has embraced being bottled water free. I won't make it seem like there is unanimous adoption. Every once and a while I will walk by an event that is handing out a bottle or two and think to myself that I should send a letter or something. But, in my mind, the biggest win from the bottled water free campaign is the improvement of the water fountains on campus. As a condition to becoming bottled water free, Physical Resources Service has invested $75,000 every year into improving the fountains on campus and adding new fountains. Don't take my word for it, every year our office produces a report to monitor the state of the water fountains on campus. The fountains are checked for 7 dimensions of quality; taste, temperature, water pressure, accessibili...

The Living Lab at uOttawa

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 ...

Imagine a Cube of Water...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo So it turns out that I got a lot of questions from my last post about just how much water we use on campus. We I didn't mention the total amount because I figured everyone would know once the annual report was published. 611,044 cubic meters of water. That's how much we consume on campus every year. This averages out to 1.7 Million litres of water every day. A lot of people have a tough time visualizing this, hence the little picture up above. If you can imagine a cube of water that is 12 meters long, by 12 meters deep, by 12 meters high... that's how much water we use daily. The average person is just under 2 meters tall. The big culprits on campus for water consumption are basically exactly who you would expect. Research equipment - Aquatic tanks, chemistry experiments, and so forth really gobble up the water. But this is a tough category to calm when you consider that fact that the University's bread and butter is research. Luck...

Water Under the Bridge

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo A funny thing happened the other day. As it turns out I was slogging away at the annual Campus Sustainability Report (which is a giant document which sucks up weeks of my time) when I started to create a simple block diagram. You see, I thought to myself that this year I would create infographics to help explain everything happening on campus. For those of you that don’t know, an infographic is a visualization of a set of data that is packaged into a simple graphic. Unlike pure data visualization, an infographic doesn’t always take an enormous amount of data, but it does take a bunch of complicated concepts and displays them in a simpler and more pleasing manner. Anyways, I was making infographics for the annual report because of the complexity of a lot of the Sustainability Data that the University generates. It is sometimes really hard to interpret the scale of the data that comes out of these reports. I will give you an example; in 2010 the Uni...

Water fountains everywhere!

Photo credit: http://www.foundshit.com/water-fountain-squirrel/ If only water fountains were everywhere…then there’d be no need for bottles. In any case, this last week, I performed the Water Fountain Assessment. I used emphatic caps to reinforce the importance of this process. What the assessment entailed was the inspection of each and every single fountain on campus and taking down information about the water pressure, temperature, taste, general fountain appearance, accessibility and availability of goosenecks. After hydrating to an unnecessary extent, these numbers were all inputted to be analyzed and compared with last year’s assessments. I am pleased to announce that there has definitely been a lot of progress, most of it being as a result of the massive construction undertakings on campus. The fact of the matter is, there is still a lot of work to be done to upgrade the fountain infrastructure at uOttawa to a satisfactory level, especially now that we’ve banned the sales of bott...