Photo credit:  http://www.progadgetreview.com The Holiday season is around the corner, and some gifts are difficult to come by. Put aside the gift cards and boxes of chocolates. Apple has recently made apps “giftable” so that you may share the Angry Birds fun with your other iphone friends. For the environmentally conscious friend, why not the Carbon Footprint Calculator? It will help with some decisions and possibly motivate those friends to plant some trees as it calculates the number of these needed to offset their carbon footprint. Diamond Grading , an app for the occasional diamond buyer. After all, diamonds are a girl’s best friend! Others wish it could be summer year round so they may go for a sail on a December afternoon. Your budget may not let you buy him a house in the South, but the Waterski Duck should keep that friend busy on those cold days. Then for those who constantly get lost. In an effort to help them get around, the GPS coordinates may be a swee...

Photo credit: Marie-Pier Je vais faire une exception à mes principes et me permettre de CHIÂLER publiquement. Imaginez-vous que je viens de constater qu’un prof m’a enlever des points de présentation sur un travail qui était imprimer recto-verso. On m’a dit que ce n’était pas professionnel et que ça avait l’air moins propre. PARDON? Un travail professionnel doit avoir une page titre, une table des matières, être paginé, avoir un style uniforme et soigné, une structure logique, des références en bas de pages, une bibliographie, des annexes à la fin du travail… Ne pas imprimer ses feuilles recto-verso pour faire plus beau c’est une CONVENTION, non une règle. Vous savez ce que ça donne des conventions? Des institutions anachroniques comme le parlementarisme canadien. Qu’est-ce que ça peut bien leur faire que j’imprime mes travaux recto-verso? C’est déjà complètement outrageant qu’on doive imprimer à double-interligne et utiliser le double du papier nécessaire pour soi-disant ...

Photo Credit: Jonathan Rausseo Take a look at the picture. What do you notice? Nothing at first right? Just your typical everyday light switch... sitting on a window... wait, on a window? So this past week the University's Energy and Environment Engineer (Faizal) decided to try out a new piece of tech in the office. It is a wireless light switch with a piezometre activator. He did this because our office is a giant open space and we needed to divide up the lights in the area. I mean come on... this is an office full of environmentalists. Do you know how close we were to taring each other apart over having the lights on? So let me dissect this wireless light switch with a piezometre activator thingy. First, the light switch is wireless, so that means there is no need to make a giant hole in the wall and run a bunch of copper wires everywhere. This is super handy if you have to move a wall for example. Rather than pulling our the light switch and al...

Photo credit:  furniturehomedesign.com You will need: glitter, left-over ribbons, old cards and limited creativity Decorations in general around this time of year are for the majority plastic and will end up in the trash either this year or within the next five. Aim to purchase decorations that are either going to last (my family has a collection of tiny porcelain houses that we have had for as long as I can remember) or make your own decorations from materials you can recycle or compost. That’s right, compost. Trees that have been sustainably grown and harvested can be used and chipped up for your mulch in the spring or use a potted tree that you can replant in the spring. Make wreathes out of pruned branches, pinecones, etc and add some flare with ribbons (my dad enjoys throwing sumac in there) and compost them when you’re finished. I also came across an interesting blog  about creating x-mass tree balls out of aluminum cans and stars out of plastic bottles, if you are...

Photo credit: www.craftypod.com Le mois de décembre arrive bientôt, la recherche de cadeaux a probablement déjà commencée pour certains d’entre vous et est peut-être même déjà complétée pour d’autres. Offrir un présent à tous nos proches et s’assurer qu’ils l’apprécieront réellement et qu’ils s’en serviront peut s’avérer être une tâche épineuse et difficile. C’est pourquoi on voit souvent ma tante recevoir un parfum qu’elle n’utilisera jamais, grand-maman recevoir une troisième mijoteuse comprenant 2 ou 3 options quétaines de plus, notre petit-frère et ses 20 transformers/dragons/petites voitures/soldats etc. Et pour finir, papa avec son nouveau coffre d’outils complet, parce qu’il a perdu quelques tournevis dans l’ancien. Le problème, c’est que ces articles en remplacent d’autres qui auraient encore très bien pu servir et qui n’avaient pas à être changés. De plus, la pluparts de ces bidules qu’on achète sont souvent faits à l’étranger et vendus par des firmes multinationales avec ...

Photo Credit: Elise Jerrim When you really get down to it, there is no end to the amount of a green geek that you can be. Case in point, I just changed my e-mail signature to an eco friendly one. How did I do this you ask.... well, let me tell you, there is more than meets the eye when it comes to formatting for the environment. What follows is a list of the common bad practices that people make when creating their e-mail signatures. But before we get into that, I think I should mention that there are critical elements that you should always have in your email signature. So, always, always, always include your name, your title or position, and how people can contact you. That is basically all you need to have an effective signature, but to make it a green signature, avoid these common mistakes. 1. The cool picture I have noticed a lot of people ending their signatures with punchy pictures. Although these are really cool for the people who see your signature...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo To recap my last blog on greenhouse gases (GHG’s) and waste: Items sent to landfill NEVER decompose, except organics; When organics decompose in a landfill, they produce methane (20X the impact of CO2); If you choose to compost 1 ton of organics, you will sequester 0.2 tons of CO2; If you choose to send that ton to a landfill, you would create 0.8 tons of CO2 Now let’s talk about uOttawa’s waste production and recycling rate; what do they mean in terms of GHG’s? Do we recycle and compost enough to cover the GHG’s emitted due to waste disposal and landfilling? Before I go on, I must say that whatever the result, nothing needs to be sent to landfill if you choose the right products – nothing will ever make entombing perfectly usable ressources in a landfill reasonable (even sequestering GHG’s!). Last year, the University sent 1082 tons of waste to the Trail rd. landfill, and 1105 tons of recyclable material (of which 98 tons were organics) to...

Je trouve que les gens ne sont pas nécessairement conscients de l’impact qu’à leur production de déchets personnelle sur l’environnement. Oui, c’est vrai, la plus part des gens recyclent parce qu’ils ont appris que c’est la bonne chose à faire (ce qui est formidable!) et que nous épargnons beaucoup d’énergie et ressources lors de la production d’un article recyclé (bonus!).  Mais j’ai souvent le sentiment que les gens agissent comme si le « mouvement » du recyclage est un peu passé. J’utilise des exemples d’étudiants qui ne veulent plus travailler sur des initiatives de recyclage dans leurs écoles (le recyclage est une initiative des années 90’!); ou des personnes qui croient réellement que l’article qu’il ou elle recycle n’aura pas d’impact direct sur l’environnement. Ils se disent : ‘Qu’est-ce que ça fait si je ne recycle pas cette bouteille?’ Ou ‘C’est juste UNE pelure de fruit!’.  Bien, j’ai des nouvelles pour vous! Cette bouteille et cette pelure ont un impact di...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo Hi, my name is Katherine and I am a cycling addict. I bike to school/work every day of the week, rain or shine, though I much prefer the shine. During the summer, I could proudly wear my tight biking shorts, biking shirt and red helmet and zoom through the Gatineau Park like a pro. Now that the temperature ranges between -2 and -10 (at 7 am and 6 pm), those shorts have joined my bikini and sun hat and out came the long johns and gloves. As much as I felt somewhat attractive this summer, now I feel like a duly padded snow(wo)man: I wear a breathable jacket with long johns, uber warm gloves, a wool scarf and a pink tuque. I could deal with the whole thing until I had to add a tuque under my helmet. I’m toasty warm going down les Allumettières, but I sure hope I don’t meet anyone I know. By the time I reach campus (12 km later), I have a runny nose, a frozen tushy (and yet sweaty armpits) and only a secure bike storage standing between my hot coffe...

Photo Credit:  www.privilegedclub.com All of last week and most of this week, several employees at the University of Ottawa have been peeling old gum off all those exam tables that will be placed in the gyms. That is disgusting! You mean to tell me that people cannot wait until they are done their exam and throw out their gum? Then some of those people complain that everything is expensive, or that there is not enough money for those things that they care about at the University…well, maybe if staff weren’t forced to waste over seven days of work to peel off every single piece of gum off of thousands of exam tables, these funds could be used on those things that they care so much about!  Let’s break that down: four to five people for over 7 days of work…about $ 6,000+. What’s worse; imagine that you had to spend over 50 long hours scratching at old gum on the backs of tables, or cleaning up a mess in residences (you cannot even imagine the worst of them)… any volunte...