As a uni student, I’d say coffee is a necessity. Looking at the long lines at Tim Hortons and Starbucks every day, I can’t imagine how much plastic and paper cups are being used up daily. Bringing your own cup to campus might seem like a small thing, but it’s actually a big win—for you and the environment. Plus, there are some sweet perks! If you’re not already on board, here’s why you should start packing your reusable cup for your next coffee run: 1. Score discounts on your daily coffee fix Who doesn’t love saving money? All campus cafes give you a discount just for bringing your own cup. That means you get your caffeine fix and save a little cash simultaneously. Our campus offers us a 25-cent discount for drinks purchased with your reusable cup. You can also get a free drink on your tenth use of your own cup. Over the semester, those discounts can really add up—think of all the extra snacks you can buy with the savings!  Here's a list of participating locations:  Première ...

Coca-cola helped popularize the modern image of Santa Clause... they didn't invent it but they used it to great effect to help sell their product and forever link Christmas and Coca-Cola. Every year our office participates in something known as the Alternative Student Break (ASB) . This activity gives students the opportunity to do a full semester of volunteer work in just one week. During the winter semester, we give a workshop about concepts related to waste and then we do a waste audit to see how the campus is doing. This past month we experimented with a new topic... anti-consumption! This idea came to us as we debated the topic of whether it was a bad thing that the Free Store was promoting the idea of consumption... which means consuming more resources. I won't spoil the entire workshop but I am going to give you a breakdown of what we did and what we discovered. The Workshop Our first day was spent going over the concepts of consumption, consumerism, and marketing. Ess...

In my previous post, I explained what NOT to bring to residence and gave the advice to be as much of a minimalist as possible. Now, I will explain what you should think of when considering what to bring to residence. Going into residence, one thing to remember is, as much as possible, to buy used items. After all, things break or get lost in the transition of moving between residences. Or maybe your roommate might even leave with your oven mitts (that might be my own personal experiences talking there). Instead of wasting your money on buying a bunch of items that will be lost by the time you graduate, buy second hand items - it's much cheaper and better for the environment! I've seen a lot of great, affordable items on Facebook Marketplace, furniture, décor, kitchenware, rugs, you name it, you can probably find it there for at least half the price of what you would pay in store. Better yet, go through your house and look through items with your family to see what they no longe...

Hi, I’m Mégane, the Sustainability and Lost and Found clerk working for the Office of Campus Sustainability this summer! The Lost and Found has gone from being managed by the University’s Protection Services to the Office of Campus Sustainability. Since I started on May 1st, we’ve already made a lot of changes to improve the efficiency of the Lost and Found. Any changes going forward will incorporate sustainability as this is now a core value of the Lost and Found.   The Lost and Found is located in the UCU, room 02A (near the bookstore). It is open and you can stop by on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 9:30 AM – 12:00 PM and 12:30 PM - 3:00 PM for the summer. During my first week of work, I spent a lot of time going through bulk bags of lost item scattered across the room, waiting to be catalogued. Slowly but surely, the room has started to feel less claustrophobic as more light could reach the den of lost treasures. I was feeling good about myself, well at lea...

Wait wait, before we get started, you can check out our uOttawa move-out guide for those living in residences! I know I know... final projects are due, papers need to be handed in, and exams are getting started. So the last thing on your mind is how to be sustainable when all this is done and you head home for the summer. But, like many things in life,  little bit of planning can go a long way. So by taking just a hot second to look over this list, you can do some real good for the planet and your community. So this list isn't going to focus on how you travel (although if you are travelling under 500 km, consider the train instead of the plane), instead it is going to focus on what to do with all the stuff you accumulated and can't take with you when you leave. Yes, we all sometimes get more stuff then we need... no judgement here. This list will help you figure out the best way to get that stuff out into the world so it can help others. Now one option you can consider before ...

It's a tale as old as time... you're coming to campus for the first time and you aren't sure what to bring with you. Well fear not, we have a handy dandy list of the things that you might not want to bring with you when you come to campus. This will save you a bunch of space in your suitcases and bags, making your life on campus a little bit easier. Although this is not as exhaustive list, we have some of the big things listed here. And of course if you aren't sure about a particular item, feel free to reach out to us for more info. Printer It can be very tempting to think that lugging that big printer  from home is a good idea... trust me it isn't. It's very rare that you will actually need to print any of your assignments, most are submitted electronically. And if you do need to print something, there are hundreds of printers on campus that you can use almost 24/7. Board games / video games I am not saying don't play board games and video games, what I am...

Hey! What do you do with your cardboard toilet paper roll when you are done with them? Toss them out? Recycle them? Transform them into recycled artwork? Well if you wouldn't mind, we would like you to collect them and bring then to us. This year the Office of Campus Sustainability is looking to create some new programs that we hope will get people involved in changing the story about sustainability. The pandemic has been a very strange time for everyone trying to create engaging activities on campus. Reimagining events so that people comply with COVID regulations isn't as easy as one might think. Our office has struggled to figure out how to make our events "worth" the in-person experience. But this year we are going to work harder to find activities that let people get involved in making a more sustainable campus while learning about living a more sustainable lifestyle. So we are asking people on campus to collect their cardboard toilet paper tubes and bring them to...

As a millennial, I have a guilty passion for Instagram. So, when I started my waste reduction journey, it quickly became one of my main sources of information. To me, waste reduction belonged to the broader minimalist movement. Getting rid of unused stuff, stopping buying things you will not use and reuse what you had seemed tinted with good old common sense. You know, the one our grandparents had?  Even though the aesthetics of owning less seemed appealing to me, I soon fell into a pit of despair as I scrolled though kitchens with matching glass containers neatly stacked in a pristine white background. Every room in the house seemed to follow the same pattern: everything matching in a neat neutral background.  Thinking of taking my reusable water bottle is a real achievement, so attaining the zero-waste home was like walking on the moon. As I kept researching, the very idea of buying containers seemed to defeat the purpose of zero waste in the first place. Why would I buy stu...

You can't imagine how many emails we get these days asking about the Free Store. Can we still drop off donations, when will the store open, what are you doing about COVID, etc... Well let's dive into some of those questions so that our community has a better idea of what is happening with the Store. In March, the Free Store experienced the beginning of the COVID crisis like everyone. News was starting to float around about the virus; some places were thinking of closing; should we close too? Just as the NBA decided to shut down, the Free Store decided that we didn't want to put people at risk and we closed our doors, uncertain about how long the pandemic would last. Fast-forward to July and the holding pattern for businesses was loosening up. At that point we decided to put together a plan that would allow operations at the Free Store to get going again. How could we not? We were getting messages every day asking about the store and how people could get access.  The Free St...

So, you are thinking about going zero waste for a few weeks; WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY AWESOME! I know it may seem difficult and even impossible, but remember the goal here is not necessarily to be 100% waste-free for the entire challenge... it is about the experience; your journey towards zero waste. You will learn how easy (or difficult) making the switch to zero waste can be for some items. It will be an experience that will change how you think about consumption for the rest of your life. I highly recommend it. I have done it three times myself (once for 8 weeks and twice for 10 weeks), and truly enjoyed my experiences. And since I have done this before, I thought I would share some tips and advice I gathered over the years. The main challenges will be your daily consumables. You might have to stop and think about all the things you consume in a day, and figure out if these products create waste. Take for example chewing gum, is there an alternative that does not create waste? (yes...

In our Drawing the Line series, we focus on the idea of what it would take to tackle some of the biggest sustainability issues on campus. One of the biggest questions I get is how can we eliminate disposable coffee cups on campus. Normally I tell people that there is legislation coming from the Ontario government that might actually deal with this problem. (check out the Waste Free Ontario Act ). But as the recent climate marches have highlighted, we need action now!! So let's imagine how we could eliminate coffee cups on a campus like that of uOttawa and what that might look like. Let's start with some background... FACT #1 - uOttawa has a disposable coffee cup problem. Every day, about 10,000 (yeah that's ten with three zeroes) disposable coffee cups are purchased and likely tossed on campus. The number is kind of staggering; stacked end to end, these cups would reach more than twice the height of the CN tower. When tossed into garbage bags, well.... let'...