The Faculty of Education's EcoClub set out to uncover the truth behind our recycling habits, and the results were were eye-opening.  Digging into the Waste Audit In late October, a dedicated group of professors and teacher candidates joined forces with Facilities to conduct a waste audit of Lamoureux, the Faculty of Education's main building. A waste audit may sound a bit technical, but it's simple: we collected all the garbage, tracked where each bag came from, and then weighed and sorted the contents. This hands-on approach allowed us to see what people are really recycling and composting, as opposed to what could be properly sorted and recycled. Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of our findings, let's address why this matters. Sending compostable organics to a landfill is not just bad for the environment; it's contributing to the climate crisis. And when recyclable items end up in the wrong bin, it's a tremendous waste of valuable resources in a worl...

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...

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...

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...

It is official; there are no more disposable fountain drink cups being sold at uOttawa! These have been one of the many items that posed such a challenge since they are not recyclable; they are composed of several different materials and (unlike coffee cups) there is no cost-effective way of separating/reusing them. Not only were they not recyclable, but people often thought they were, which led to them contaminating the metal/plastic/glass category in the recycling stations at food service locations. When there is simply too much of the wrong item in the bin (50%+), we sadly end up throwing it out; either the company leaves it in our garage or the employee just doesn’t have time to go through the bags of recycling and sort the items inside the recycling stations. But as of September 2015, we no longer have to worry about these cups! (Thank you Food Services!) When you aren’t on campus, and do end up coming across a location that still uses these (most fast food locations)...

It’s happened… I have fallen down the waste reduction rabbit hole. I am not necessarily proud of this but digging through my household trash has become a nightly routine, a mission to properly sort any and all misplaced recycling and compost! I’ve seen and smelled it all, yet I continue to do it because, in my heart of hearts I know that although I am just one person, my waste has a large environmental impact. The average Canadian produces 2.7 kg of waste every day! To me, that represents a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t necessarily have to end up in a landfill. This year, as part of Recylemania, a group of brave crusaders will set out on a clandestine operation to properly sort waste on campus! A year ago, had you told me that burrowing through bags of trash would be an eye opening experience; I would not have believed you. Having performed waste audits I can tell you that digging through garbage is FASCINATING! Not only have I learned how to properly dispose of my items (an...

Up until a few months ago, waste was not frequently on my mind. Every second week I would make my sacrifice to the Garbage Truck gods and that was the end of that. However dealing with waste on a campus scale opened my eyes to the impacts of our collective action. At first, I felt rather distressed, I knew a problem existed but I felt as though the problem was bigger than me and I did not know how to solve it. In honour of Waste Reduction Week, I looked to my colleagues for inspiration on concrete actions which can help me reduce personal waste. Reduce packaging Nothing angers me more than having to tear through 5 different layers of packaging to get to my food. WHY WON’T YOU LET ME EAT YOU?! It appears as though everything nowadays is packaged, even packaging is packaged! Buying in bulk is one of the ways I have found to reduce waste and those dreaded plastic bags. Some bulk retailers like Market Organics will even let you bring your own Tupperware. As an added bonus buying i...

Incredible and unfortunate, but true: Canadians are the biggest producers of municipal waste per capita in the developed world, according to a study by the Conference Board of Canada . This week is National Waste Reduction Week (from October 21st to 27th), and we’ll be making important changes to the recycling counters on campus — all 170 of them! — so that most of them will have 4 categories: Metal, Plastic, Glass  Mixed Paper Compost  Garbage.  Our aim is to divert as much waste from landfill as possible while at the same time encouraging better recycling and composting practices among students and staff. Last year we composted 70 tons of organic material through the University’s industrial composter. Hopefully, adding compost options to more of the recycling counters will increase that number quite a bit. Besides ensuring that many more recycling counters have compost options, the yellow signs that say “all plastics” will be changed to read “metal, plas...

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...

Bottled Water haunts me. In spite of not drinking them, I see them littering the streets or thrown in the garbage all over uOttawa even though recycling stations are becoming a dominant feature in our campus landscape.  We offer students free reusable water bottles hoping they will make the switch [they’re available at the SFUO Sustainability Centre ], we have the Freestore which offers up an assortment of options from stainless steel water bottles, to leftovers from the 101 week kits, to plastic and glass cups you could store in your bag and use during class lectures, and there are even Brita pitchers at the Freestore that you could take home with you to eliminate your consumption at home. Upon entering filterforgood.ca, one is bombarded with messages about how you can reduce your environmental impact by purchasing one filter that can replace 300 water bottles.  I personally trust in Ottawa’s public water systems because of the surplus of research I have com...

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...

Congratulations uOttawa; we are RecycleMania Canadian champions for the fourth year in a row! We achieved a 50% waste diversion rate average, and we produced only 14.17 lbs. per person of waste during the 8 weeks of the competition. Overall, with 605 participating Canadian and American institutions we placed 27th; which is pretty amazing considering that most of the institutions that did better than us had under 10,000 students – some even under 1,000. I would like to thank all of you who helped us achieve this by learning to recycle better, bringing their reusable coffee mugs, creating less waste, building waste awareness displays on campus, and especially those of you pledged to live waste-free during RecycleMania; it has a huge impact on the people around you - one of our campus departments was inspired by your stories and decided to do it for a whole week. You are also responsible for inspiring us to create the objective of becoming a zero waste uOttawa by the year 2020; wh...