Get ready to flip your lid for sustainable giving! Although I rarely encourage folks to get paper cups when they are getting their caffeine fix, but this year's annual Roll Up The Rim season is a little different. Cuppa Change , a charitable start-up imagined by a group of lovely uOttawa students, is rolling out their Roll Up For Change initiative! It's a simple way to give back to the local community. Picture this: It's Roll Up The Rim season. You get a cup of coffee from one of three campus Tim Horton's before class. En route, you roll up the rim and for once this time it's not "please play again!" You won a free cup of coffee! Way to go! Then you pass one of uOttawa's many amazing recycling stations. You rip off the winning rim and you obviously put the remaining paper cup in the proper receptacle, because hello it's 2017. But wait! Above the recycling stations there is a new addition... a little red box where you can donate your ...

It is that time of the year again, when millions of Canadians hold their breath, squeeze all their hopes into the pit of their stomachs, and roll up the rim to see if they win. The problem is that the only thing we are actually winning is a crappier planet. Roll up the Rim to Win has been the bane of my existence for the past decade. The University of Ottawa, like every other University, has a disposable cup problem: there are too many of them to put a fine point to it. Many, if not the majority of disposable coffee cups, are tossed directly into the garbage on campus. There is a general misconception that coffee cups are covered with so much wax that they can’t be recycled (I can’t blame anyone, what is that stuff on the inside of the cup that is super shinny and stops water from leaking out of it?). Otherwise, people understand that you can recycle them and they do just that... except that they do it while the cup is still half full of coffee. That means that the coffee so...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo So long as something 'guaranteed' by a company/product is not written in clear, factual letters or official, governmentally issued symbols (Such as the plastic 1-7 recycling sign), you can pretty safely assume that assuming anything about them is a bad idea. A prime example of this is the "Respect the Environment" text written on the bottom of a Tim Horton's coffee cup, or the fact that there is a picture of a Tim Horton's cup on the 'paper' section of Tim Horton's waste stations. Is the Tim Horton's coffee cup recyclable? TECHNICALLY the answer is yes. TECHNICALLY, if coffee HASN'T BEEN POURED INTO THE CUP YET, the cup is paper recyclable. But the moment coffee has been poured into a disposable cup, it stains the inner edge of the cup and makes it damp and completely useless. On top of that, if any coffee is left in the cup when it's disposed (Which is all too common a happenstance for our disgustingly wa...