I can't say that I feel an overwhelming urge to try something new at the start of the new year, but I can assure you that many people do. My friends have been pestering me to reveal my new year's resolution for 2013 and most of my answers have been met with some rather underwhelmed expressions. I guess you can't get away with "typical" resolutions when you are a sustainability manager. So I started to do a little bit of research about what would be an appropriate resolution for 2013, you know one that is meaningful and easy to do and is good for the planet. But at the same time, the resolution has to be a bit of a sacrifice  I decided to narrow down my resolution to something related to CO2 production. I know that there are a lot of other issues out there to focus on but with so many of my friends coming back from DOHA with stories to tell, it kind of seemed like the right thing to do for this year. The next challenge was to find one of the biggest sources...

(water fountain at the University of Ottawa) So last week was World Water Day and I have to ask a question, what did you do to celebrate? I know what you are thinking, "World Water Day... Are you serious?" You know, on a level I definitely feel you. Sure, water is super important, but come on... why not start celebrating air, or sunlight, or language? We are pretty spoiled here in Canada when it comes to a lot of things and I think that water is at the top of that list. We so take it for granted that it is basically forgotten that people used to have to take staggered showers not even a century ago. We hear about things like drought in the Prairies, but it is an alien concept to most of us. If you want to flush a toilet, you don't even think twice. If you need water to drink, you go to a tap or buy it at a store. The idea that there was simply no more water does not compute in our minds. The one beautiful thing about water is that we still recognize that it is v...

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...

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...