Il semble que les colloques/congrès sur le « développement durable » ont augmenté au cours des dernières années. La raison est assez simple : la durabilité est très importante ! Pour être honnête, la durabilité peut être un concept difficile à appréhender et certains pourraient penser qu'il n'est rien d'autre qu'une tendance, en particulier du fait que les entreprises font beaucoup de « lavage vert » avec leurs produits, services, événements, etc. L'affaire est, la durabilité ne touche pas seulement l'environnement ; elle affecte également la société et l'économie. C'est pourquoi les colloques/congrès sont idéales pour éduquer les gens à propos des solutions durables ! SPECTRUM 2009 a touché ce concept à différents niveaux avec des experts en matière de politiques ainsi que des dirigeants communautaires et des représentants de tous les ordres de gouvernement, du milieu universitaire, du secteur privé, de groupes communautaires et d’organisations ...

School’s in! It is probably appropriate to talk a bit about courses on campus. Why? Because they can contain sustainable development content, or they can be environmentally conscious in the way they are run. We’ll touch upon the latter first because it’s pretty basic: less paper, less resources, less waste. Tips for students and professors to green their classroom (these items generally must be mutually agreed upon) Double-side your assignments, or print them single spaced or on already used one-sided paper Have assignments submitted online or via email Use online course material (also lowering costs to students for copyright material) Encourage taking notes and not printing all slides or readings on paper Buy recycled paper notebooks, or reused one-sided paper notebooks (can be purchased at Reprography) As far as sustainable content, there are a number of courses offered that talk about issues of sustainability and sustainable development. The next blog post will likely be an offs...

I thought that I should make this entry based on other people’s work. Normally I love having to do very little and take credit for other people’s work, but this time I can’t really take any of the credit. And bravo to all those who had the tenacity to put a little elbow grease into their lives. There is an old adage in the waste diversion game that goes like this, “Reduce before you reuse; reuse before you recycle; recycle before you trash.” It’s a simple thing to follow and it is structured in a way that saves the most resources. If you can reduce something than you don’t have to reuse it, and so forth and so on. Now let’s put this whole thing into play. We are working on a furniture recycling program here at the University. Most of the time we are catering to the campus services but every once and a while we have some stuff we are going to throw out and we have some people in need. So why not give it to them? Well that’s exactly what happened here; some people in need of chairs ca...

I am. Are you? Is your wallet? A common immediate response to how to solve issues of environmental damages, poor animal treatment, and unhealthy food in the food industry is to focus on concerted individual (often read: consumer) efforts to make change. The idea that (and this is a direct paraphrase from the movie) your vote is your dollar. You tell the food industry that you want organic, good for you food, it will happen. I saw the documentary Food, Inc at the Bytowne Cinema. I quite enjoyed it. I found it to have a lot of useful information and even be relatively accessible to folks who may not know much about the food industry. It was pretty graphic at times, which is effective and necessary however it obviously turns some stomachs. Let’s think about this. There is something wrong with the food industry. Most can agree with this, no matter which side you are coming from. It is efficient in ways, but very inefficient in others. There is overproduction, increased risk ...

So the Katimavikers are back in town, and not a minute too late! For all of you who don’t know about the program, Katimavik is a national program that teaches youth a valuable lesson about life, the universe, and everything. Follow this link for a much better description than mine. Now this is the third year that Katimavik will be working with the Office of Campus Sustainability. I will be the first to admit that I perpetuate the myth of the Katimaslave (esclavavik pour les francophones). Really! I have them come in every day and work like dogs for basically no pay. And of course this blog is about demystifying things… so here goes. It isn’t actually easy keeping Katimavik participants motivated (that’s their real titles but sometimes I just give up and call them parts). Think about it, if you weren’t getting paid, what could I possibly offer to get you to do some back-breaking labour? Especially if some of the things we have them do is pretty monotonous. So the solution??? W...

The University of Ottawa is and has been a very green campus for many years; perhaps even since its inception. You don’t have to take this fact completely on faith, I promise to lay out my argument for this in future blogs, but for now let’s assume that uOttawa is one of the greenest institutions in North America. This begs the question; if we are so green why is it that no one knows this? The answer unfortunately is complicated, but I will do my best to keep it simple. I have actually mentioned this problem in previous posts but the University of Ottawa’s green initiatives are almost all invisible. Allow me to illustrate; the University employs a district heating system which means that there are pipes under the campus that shares the heat between buildings. Not exactly the kind of thing you would notice while strolling around outside. So the name of the game is to make the invisible... visible. Tricky, I know. But fear not, we here at the office have been dreaming up tonnes o...

Un taux de réacheminement de déchets de 60 % pour l’Université? Pas de problème! Avec notre nouveau système de compost incroyable, nous l’avons dans le sac! À partir du mercredi 2 septembre 2009, si vous mangez au Café Nostalgica sur campus, tous vos restes de nourriture sur vos assiettes seront compostés. De plus, depuis que le café a reçut son récipient pour la collecte de leur compost, ils peuvent composter tous les restes de cuisine et les serviettes. Ils nous aident à atteindre notre objectif en compostant tous leurs restes de nourriture, serviettes, et verres compostables. Merci Café Nostalgica! -brigitte

I’ve got the level with you, this is one of the most exciting projects that I’ve worked on in the history of ever. Let me lay down some context. Every year the University of Ottawa sends 500 students abroad to study in foreign and exotic places. Some people go to the States, some go to Australia. The one thing they all have in common... air travel. So air-travel is bad. I hope that I am not shocking you with any big revelation here. Air travel is simply the highest form of energy use for travel (except maybe over really long distances but let’s save that conversation for another day). The International Office, the campus’ study abroad coordinators, have come up with a bold concept. They want to offset those emissions. I can’t tell you how much my body was tingling when they told me this. Arguments aside about CO2 as a global warming agent, I thought that this idea was simply revolutionary. Why you ask? Because it forces people to recognize that their travel comes at a cost to the envir...

Hey, did you see the demolition of the Child Studies building? That building beside the Vanier Building? Well if you didn’t see it you can see the hole in the ground that was left behind. Now in case you wanted to know a little bit about how green buildings make a difference you are about to get your wish. You may or may not know but the new Social Science Tower that is going into the place of the old Child Studies Building is going to be LEED certified. Fun fact number 2, if you want to have a LEED certified building than you have to demolish the old building in an environmentally friendly manner. So when the old building was being knocked down there was a series of environmental measures that had to be implemented. The two most notable ones were the dust control measures and the material recycling. Dust control was a nice touch and actually kind of funny to watch. It consisted of having someone using a big hose to spray water on all of the pieces of the building as it was being knock...

Picture from Dan Thompson Design Le lieu pour le colloque World Changing Careers (WCC) a sans aucun doute aidé aux participants à mettre leurs états d'esprit au bon endroit. Le vaste campus de l’Université de la Colombie Britannique était entouré de nature à chaque tournant : grandes vignes grimpant les bâtiments, énormes arbres partout, l'océan à proximité et bien plus encore. Voir telle beauté a suscité un profond désir de préserver les ressources de notre terre. Nous savons tous qu'il est vrai ; notre demande de ressources et des services de l'écosystème est continuellement croissante lorsqu’il y a une baisse de la capacité de la terre de fournir ces ressources et services. « Nous constatons déjà les conséquences ; l'effondrement de la pêche dans le monde entier menace la vie et les moyens de subsistance, la perte des terres arables contribue à l'insécurité alimentaire mondiale et la réduction des approvisionnements en moyenne de l'eau potable signifie q...

As you all know the University of Ottawa is the new recipient of what appears to be the first mechanical composter in an Ontario university setting. That’s right... ici on compost! So here’s the low down. A mechanical composter is exactly what it sounds like, a composter that mechanically composts its contents. This is different from most other composters which are typically simple wind row systems. Mechanical composting systems are typically in-vessel systems (i.e. inside a big tube) that rotate periodically. This is a good time to add a side note. In case you wanted to know, the process of composting is very rudimentary. You take organic waste, you add oxygen, and there you have it. Composting is actually a ridiculously easy process, the goal is really just to try to keep to the bacteria in the garbage alive and they will take care of the rest. So the university’s new composter rotates the waste inside of it every hour to keep feeding oxygen into the system. Two weeks later the organ...

Picture from www.greencleaningmatters.co.u k Most people dread using those old, ineffective “hot air hand-cookers” found everywhere, but there’s a new wave of energy-efficient high-speed hand dryers on the rise. Keeping in mind, uOttawa stocks 100% post-consumer recycled paper towels, which of the two is really faster, cheaper and more environmentally friendly? Physical Resources Services hired me for the summer and asked me to figure out the answer to this question. In our analysis, we evaluated a range of electric hand dryers and compared them to using paper towels. The results named the “Jet Towel” as the best alternative hand dryer. Designed by Mitsubishi Electric in Japan, it’s a time-tested effective high-speed hand dryer. Unlike conventional convection hand dryers, the Jet Towel uses a high speed curtain of air to “scrape” excess water off your hands. Now, considering the resources associated with using the Jet Towel or paper towel, it is in fact more ecological to use the...

Image uploaded from the EVO blog ( check it out ) I may have titled this blog with a little bit of a misleading statement; technically the plant isn’t newly open for business, it has been open for business for quite a while but trust me... this is kind of new. Now the second thing that I should address before I really get into this is the notion of a negawatt (what is it and why should you care). Well a negawatt is a concept that has been floating around for a bit of time now, but only as a whisper really. The idea is simple. A watt is a unit of power; 15 watts is what it takes to run your typical compact fluorescent light bulb. Now at the University we use thousands and thousands of lights so we don’t deal with watts, we deal with megawatts (a million watts). Now take that concept and flip it on its head. Rather than generating energy, say a megawatt of energy, a negawatt does the opposite, it removes a megawatt of energy. And that’s the deal right there; negawatts are the amount ...

Un contenant à emporté avec le compost? Absolument! L’Université d’Ottawa est maintenant la première institution postsecondaire parmi les autres en Ontario à se procurer sa propre machine à compost électrique. De plus, nous devançons la Ville d’Ottawa, qui planifie lancer son système de collectes organiques d’ici le printemps prochain. Tandis que à cet automne (2009), nous mettrons notre de compostage en marche en commençant par la foire alimentaire au Centre universitaire. D'ailleurs, notre fournisseur de services alimentaires, Chartwells, a accepté de convertir tous ses contenants à emporter, tasses et coutellerie jetables à des contenants à emporter, tasses et coutellerie compostables ! Brigitte Morin, Coordonnatrice du recyclage et du réacheminement des déchets : bmorin@uottawa.ca www.durable.uottawa.ca ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is that a take-out container with compost? Absolutely! The University of ...

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning. -Albert Einstein J’ai participé au colloque de World Changing Careers (WCC) à l’Université de la Colombie-Britannique du 23 au 27 juillet 2009. Des étudiants, des chefs d’entreprise, des éducateurs, le gouvernement, des ONG et des professionnels de tous les domaines se sont réunis à Vancouver. Ce colloque a donné les outils nécessaires pour poursuivre une carrière en durabilité et comment intégrer les idées de pointe afin d'effectuer une différence positive. Nous avons recueilli une gamme d’idées à travers diverses discussions de groupes, discours principaux et ateliers sur la façon de reconfigurer les systèmes de notre société pour répondre aux besoins futurs de notre génération. Avec ce symposium, nous sommes arrivés à réaliser que n’importe quelle carrière, que ça soit en affaire, éducation, agriculture, médias ou encore plus, peuvent facilement intégrer la durabili...