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...

I can't imagine how many posts you are going to see this year telling you about all the sustainable things you can do to respect the planet and still have a good time. Well, we thought we would also put together a list of the easiest things you can do too, except our list will be bare bones and only give you the "greenest" options. No razzle, no dazzle, all killer, no filler. Sorry that these suggestions are pretty christian focused. Don't use wrapping paper, put your gift in a reusable bag instead. I have honestly been doing this for years. I throw my gifts in a sack and present them to my friends and family each year. Nobody cares that the gift is in a reusable bag, and if they want they can even keep the bag afterwards (I mean who doesn't have a 1000 of these things all about anyways).  I think I might even be as bold as to say that some people are relieved that they don't have to deal with that paper afterwards. It might seem innocuous but wrapping paper i...

If there was one thing that you wish you could recycle but don't think you can, what would it be? Cosmetics, shoes, wipes? Well we are looking to add a few new recycling programs on campus and we need your input!! Is Recycling Good? There are some really good arguments out there that suggest recycling systems are broken. And I am not going to lie... they make a lot of sense. On the one hand, many people don't understand that recycling is an energy intensive activity that sometimes takes more energy than it might be worth. Recycling programs, especially curbside ones, don't recycle all the products they could... or sometimes companies promise their products are recyclable but they aren't actually in your city. But on the other hand, doing something is better than doing nothing, right? Getting onto the habit of trying to recycle helps lead to other positive environmental behaviours. And asking for more recycling will help push for better recycling and events and in your c...

If there is one thing I've learned as a recycling coordinator at uOttawa is that when it comes to waste, the learning curve is very very steep. If for me, whose work involves going through garbage daily, correctly triaging my waste seems complicated, what about a student? As I yelled a curse-word at yet another mis-triaged bin, I started to wonder. Was the system too complicated or the people not informed as they should be? Or, do they just not care? My answer is “they do” seem to care...as long as the process is not so complex as to requiring them holding three masters degrees to understand it or taking an hour of their time to sort one item. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a system is “a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized framework or method”. The only drawback with this definition is that there is no indication to the amount of complexity people can handle. But, to no surprise, the more options you have, the more likel...

My first week living in Canada was spent sorting through trash, and I am so glad I had the chance to do it! As a new graduate student at the University of Ottawa, I made the decision to leave my job in Boston and make the move up to Ottawa during Reading Week. While looking for ways to hit the ground running, I found the Alternative Study Break program, and decided to spend my week volunteering with the Office of Campus Sustainability. We were tasked with performing a waste audit on the Friel Residence, then collecting and analyzing the data. Talking about the issues with waste, collection, and contamination was an eye-opening experience and having the opportunity to see for myself the amount of waste that is produced by one building felt like an urgent wake-up call. We found a staggering amount of waste contamination, as recycling and garbage were often placed in the incorrect streams. Surprisingly, the majority of waste was incorrectly placed, and this carries significant implication...

This semester we are featuring a series of blog posts from students in the ENV 2301 course "History of Environmental Thought". We are super happy to highlight the thoughts and ideas of these bright young individuals. A student working with Poly plastic recycling machine, (Poly Plastics, 2020). The University of Ottawa is dedicated in its mission to create a sustainable campus that uses innovation and technology to push towards a green future. The Office of Campus Sustainability is a pillar in this mission. They engage students by creating interactive campaigns that are hard to miss on campus, all while generating conversation around how to be more environmentally conscious.  Campaigns often focus on waste diversion and engage the community where students have the chance to show off their favourite reusable mug for a free coffee or connect with local farmers while picking up a weekly produce box . Although the University of Ottawa has made sustainable steps towards a waste-fr...

Can you imagine a world without garbage and landfills? In fact there is an easy solution to reduce waste and we can even make something useful out of it.  Composting! Maybe it doesn’t sound appealing at first; you know food scraps, banana peels, dirty napkins….but composting works like magic. Compost is made of organic materials (meaning that they are composed of carbon) and therefore will decompose and eventually, disappear (not quite, but it transforms into soil). To put it more academically: composting is a process in which organic matter is aerobically broken down into water, carbon dioxide, and some residual materials. It is Nature's way of recycling.   When food scraps and paper go to landfill they cannot properly breakdown, because they become buried and eventually run out of oxygen. Instead, they create methane (a potent greenhouse gas that is about 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth). After using public transportation and changing ...

Today is another day... wake up, brush my teeth, get to the University, spend the rest of the day emptying out the Free Store donation bin. Monday, empty the bin. Tuesday, empty the bin. Wednesday, open the Free Store... then empty the bin. Thursday, empty the bin. Friday, empty the bin. You're seeing the pattern right? This is something we are seeing at the Free Store this summer. We used to fill up the donation bin once a week, now it is once a day. We are getting record amounts of donations, which is great from a waste reduction point of view, but horrible from a resource requirement point of view. Put simply, it takes too much time to sort and clean all the new donations. We've spent some time trying to figure out what's happening (why are we getting so many donations) and we have come up with a few theories. Online shopping is taking off and that means a lot of purchases made were for things that didn't fit properly, or were passing flights of fancy...

 So in our lovely 24/7 Dining Hall we hear about the waste we produce all the time. I mean it’s not really waste it's all compost for us, not as bad as garbage, right. With the Love Food Not Waste event taking place last week, I asked myself the simple question: if we produce this much waste just eating, how much does the kitchen produce making the food we eat? You see the Dining Hall is zero waste but that is in the part where you and I eat. There are no straws, no wrappers, no containers, nothing that can become garbage. What about in the "back of house" where all the food is made? Is that also zero waste? Now figuring this out was a little harder than I thought so I got in contact with Maryann Moffitt from Food Services and asked her to show me around. First there were a lot of elevators and stairs in there, WOW! I would have definitely gotten lost. Luckily I had Maryann to guide me. We went right to the core of the question which meant the she actually too...

Every year during RecycleMania the Waste bucket challenge is issued. What is the Waste Bucket challenge? It is trying to live waste free for a period of time during RecyleMania. This may seem impossible but Brigitte Morin, uOttawa's Waste Diversion Coordinator, has done it many times successfully. Here is what she had to say about it. It’s all about preparation Brigitte says the key to succeeding in this challenge is to prepare. You have to think about it all ahead of time, what you have to buy, what meals you are making etc. Stuff you have at home already counts If you have food in disposable containers at home you need to finish them before the challenge starts because if you finish them while on the challenge you have to count it as waste. You don’t have to produce zero waste just less than normal When people hear about the challenge they assume they cannot produce any waste to be successful, but that’s not the truth. The challenge is about reducing waste not elim...

The Waste Free Ontario Act was passed on June 1st and so it is time to start thinking about how the University of Ottawa is going to become a waste free campus. For the faithful followers of the Office of Campus Sustainability you will know that we have been plotting a waste-free campus for years now. Over the past decade, the campus has increased its recycling programs to the tune of a 20% increase in the diversion rate. Lots of cool programs and some pretty decent results across the board. But lately, our campus diversion rate has stagnated. There are a couple of good reasons why the needle hasn't moved on the diversion rate recently. Let's look at a couple of these reasons so that we can figure out a path to becoming a zero waste campus. REDUCING The University of Ottawa is reducing more; instead of purchasing things, we are reusing more stuff or simply not buying it in the first place. This is exactly what happened in the 2014-15 fiscal year whereby the overall s...

RecycleMania has launched at the University of Ottawa, and indeed around North America, and this year we are using a new tactic that we picked up from our friends over at Penn State Sustainability. It's called Toilet Paper. Basically every 2 weeks we are posting infographics about food waste and recycling in the washroom stalls around campus. The beauty of this approach is that we basically have a captive audience. The downside is that we get complaints about using paper to promote recycling. But rest assured that we did do a lot of thinking before we decided to post paper... Here are our findings. Large Posters vs. Small Posters We considered using large posters to spread the word about food waste and found that because of their positioning on the walls, the visibility of most posters is low and they are rarely read. Numbers vary wildly, but it could be assumed that between 4% and 8% people that pass by a poster will read it. Conversely, nearly 100% of posters posted i...