Photo Credit: www.123rf.com (photo site) La région de l’Outaouais connait année après année une croissance marquée du nombre de personnes qui sont dans le besoin. Centraide à estimé à 21,2% la population de l’Outaouais qui vit avec un faible revenu. Ceci se manifeste par une augmentation significative dans la demande de service d’aide au près des œuvres de charités. De plus, 7000 est le nombre total de personnes qui auront eu recours à l’aide des œuvres de charités. Si vous voulez faire une différence et faire du ménage au même temps, prenez un petit 30 min pour jeter un coup d’œil dans votre garde-robe, bibliothèque et même cuisine. Mettez dans un sac ou dans une boite tous les articles que vous n’avez jamais utilisé et ceux que vous n’utiliseriez plus. Ajouter également à cela tout article que vous pensez jeter en pensant qu’il ne servira à personne. Rappelez-vous, la poubelle des uns est le trésor des autres! Apporter vos articles à une des résidences (complexe 90 Université, à Hy...

Photo Credit: Jonathan Rausseo Yes it is that time of the year again. Everyone on campus hits the malls to start the holiday shopping, starts drinking hot chocolate religiously, and starts getting the skates sharpened for the opening, closing, opening, and closing of the canal (damn you global warming !!!) But it is also the time of the year that sees the residences close for the holidays. As if exams weren't already stressful enough, the university also sends everyone packing for 2 weeks. Which is not such a bad thing from an energy point of view... but we can have that discussion some other time. This conversation is reserved for the Dump and Run. So you are about to leave to go home for the holidays, but... you have a ridiculous amount of stuff. A couple of bags clothes that don't fit anymore (damn you taste desserts !!!) or that you've decided just aren't your style, a few boxes of swag (that stuff you pick up for free at tales but that you never really do anything ...

On Tuesday night I attended a pretty cool event organized by the Telfer Student Council about Tom's Shoes. I am going to stop right here and play my "full disclosure" card. First the event was organized by Danielle Perrault (a former employee of mine). Second, it was a teaser event for the Sustainable Business Conference, for which I am on the organizing committee. But none of that should matter because the event was really cool for a couple of reasons. One, I had no knowledge about TOM's shoes before that night. Two, the event was followed up by a pretty good open forum talk that included Guy Laflamme (the VP Communications over at the NCC and a prof at the Telfer School). And three, about half of the event was conducted in French, making this event a pretty bilingual event. The night started up by a documentary viewing of TOM's Shoes. The movie actually didn't rub me the right way at first. It really started out as a bunch of rich people playing polo and tak...

Photo credit: Surveyonline Il y a deux semaines, j’ai eu le plaisir de travailler sur les sondages de la classe du cours de première année d’environnement…oui! Vous l’avez peut être deviné c’est dans le cadre du cours ENV1101, enseigner par Éric Crighton. Moi, je m’occupais des sondages concernant le recyclage au campus. La grande aventure commençait lorsque mon patron, Jon m’envoie les résultats des sondages qu’il a reçu des étudiants. J’en recevais une dizaine à la fois…au point que ma boite courriel ne fonctionnait pas très bien car elle était saturée de messages. Ma tâche principale était de s’assurer que les données sont bien rentrées dans les diverses pages Excel, pour en suite les jumeler dans un même document. Ça semble simple dit comme cela, mais la réalité était toute autre. Je vous explique. Les problèmes que j’ai rencontrés étaient soit que le fichier ne s’ouvrait pas, car il a été fait dans un ordinateur Mac, soit les données n’étaient pas complètes faute de tricherie d...

So last Friday was World Toilet Day and I figured that I really gotta get this post out before I get an old post. But I didn't have internet access this weekend and ... well you know how it is. Anyways WTD 2010 was celebrated on campus with a squat-a-thon and some great trivia games by the good people of the Health Promotion team. Yours truly (although maybe less so with this creepy moustache) even gave a presentation about water related issues on campus. So this post is dedicated to 2 things: a shout out to water sanitation and a bit of info about uOttawa's water management initiatives. I remember last year I counselled one of my student employees to do a project in her business class about the mighty toilet as one of the best inventions of all time. She got a great mark and learned something really important; mainly that half of the world's population does not have access to a toilet. In return, she schooled me about things I hadn't known about; mainly the millions ...

I was rencently flipping through the uOttawa ‘Research Perspectives’ magazine, and I came across a familiar face. Dr. Variola, a biomedical engineer chose a recyclied desk (the one in the picture) from our recycled furniture program. Each year, we renovate and optimize spaces around campus; which send an unbeleivable amount of furniture to landfill. This furniture is usually in perfect condition, was very expensive (the average workstation with filing cabinet and task chair has a price tag of about $2,200), and may only be a year old. A few years ago, we decided to start a program to collect this furniture, and offer it to other depatments on campus (rather than buying the same things). If a department or University service needs to get rid of their furniture, we get it transferred to our storage, where it is sorted and put on display for future university employees. If a university employee is in need of a specific piece of furniture, they come by and choose what would be best for th...

Okay so you didn’t hear this from me but I may have gotten in over my head. You see I am working on this project with Eric Crighton, a prof over in the Geography and Environmental Studies. Actually we have been working together for the past four years on this project. The objective of our project is very simple. Use first year students to change the way that our school work is conducted to basically save the world. Please allow me to put together a couple of concepts that have crossed my path recently. 1- There is this concept called the Living Laboratory. It is pretty simple; use the campus as a huge on-going experiment so that every day events can become teachable moments. So a building gets built – engineering students study how this happens. A new marketing campaign is launched – communications students evaluate its success. A jogging club is formed – health science students help create an optimum training schedule. And so on and so on. 2- Course Work Ecology – why is it that we ar...

Publiée le 29 Octobre, 2010 Le Halloween est une fête apprécier tant par les enfants que par grands, comme nos étudiants à l’Université d’Ottawa. La dépense pour les décorations, costumes et bonbons est estimée à 55$ par personne. Ceci prouve pourquoi les ventes de bonbons et de grignotines au Canada a augmenté de 47 millions de dollars en 2007 pour donner une somme de 285 million $. (Voir note 1 en bas) Cette année je vous propose d’être économe et écologique au même temps. Comment me diriez-vous? C’est simple. i) La décoration : commencer par acheter une citrouille locale et garder la chair et les graines pour faire de bons potages, muffin et tarte. Illuminer les citrouilles, je vous aurai proposé d’acheter les chandelles de cire ou de soja qui ne sont pas faites à base de pétrole, mais elles sont malheureusement trop couteuse pour notre maigre bugget d’étudiant. Alors, je vous propose de les illuminer avec des lampes de poches sans pile Lorsque Halloween se term...

Photo Credit: Jonathan Rausseo So, I raved and ranted just a tiny bit in the last blog, but to be honest, I was incredibly frustrated with the way the 101 Week turned out, with regards to recycling and general respect for the milieu. Socially, the week was a tremendous success, despite the offensively hideous weather. I believe that the reason why our 101 Week was less successful in regards to campus sustainability is the fact that the guides were not put in a position where they cared enough to act accordingly themselves, let alone influence the 101ers positively. This negative attitude began with guide training, where the individuals training the incoming guides flipped through all the slides concerning campus sustainability as though they were entirely irrelevant to the rest of the presentation. The fact is, they’re not. If the trainers don’t care, then we have no reason to. The chain of apathy continues, and voila! Now the 101ers don’t care either. Once you’ve already dismissed th...

Photo Credit: Jonathan Rausseo New students arrived on this campus well before the start of classes to participate in 101 Week, and this was the best possible opportunity to inform them of everything that happens on this campus. As both a guide and employee of this office, I felt it necessary to make sure that the new students were aware of our bottle-free state, and that they know how to recycle on campus. The logistics of planning 101 Week and all its events are extremely complex, as there are so many elements to consider, and often, adding on a ‘green’ element will take a back seat. The main reason is that there are a lot of students generating a lot of waste, and managing this aspect is a tremendous effort. Since the University is now officially bottled water free, water bottles have been replaced by providing large water jugs that the students can use to fill up their own reusable bottles. This cuts down on a lot of plastic being left as waste, but this isn’t the only problem. Ju...

Photo Credit: Jonathan Rausseo As I sit in my office surrounded by literally over 100 plants I can't help but wonder how I got here. Co-workers pass by and constantly ask if they can have one, but I deny them any access to the precious plants. "No, these plants are for science!" I exclaim. Let's back up. A couple of months ago I got an e-mail from Dr Scott Findlay about EVS 3101 . Every year Scott teaches the course and every year he makes sure to contact the science community and ask them if we have an interesting project for his students. Every year I submit a couple of ideas and every year I never get any takers, but this year I only submitted one. I can't quite explain why but it seemed like this was the big one... the experiment that would help make a difference. And so, this year, unlike any other year, my project was accepted. A group of three students will study the impact of indoor plants on the air quality of a classroom. I guess I should explain why I ...

Photo Credit: Danika Brisson's camera Last night the SFUO’s Sustainability Center got things started with a bang. The center, which is only a couple of months old, held their first open house with the community. There was cake, and juice, and oh yes.... reusable dishes. Opted for a whiteboard instead of a paper flip chart, the Center assembled a group of environmentally minded individuals in the Café Alt to discuss how the community would like to see the Center play a role on campus. In fact, all were invited to attend. There were a myriad of ideas: everything from more options for vegetarians, to more assessments of how green are the SFUO businesses, to creating a blog to increase information flow for opportunities (hhhmmmm I think that at this point I feel it is my duty to at least offer this blog as a potential candidate for more helping centralize green activities). I walked away from the meeting feeling pretty good. For years there have been a handful of environmental initiati...

Photo Credit: Damon Chen There are so many reasons to want to bike. I mean yeah there’s the environment, saving money and that bit of exercise. But seriously it’s just plain fun. You get to know your community on a whole different level, and get to pull some serious Kevin Lynchian urban jamming. Unfortunately though, cycling as a hobby isn’t always the easiest thing to break into. When I started biking about a year and a half ago, I was a disaster. I didn’t even know that cyclists were supposed to obey stop signs. I couldn’t tell the difference between a derailleur and a gear cassette, and changing an inner tube was way beyond my meagre skills. My friends called me a public hazard and I had no evidence to the contrary. Let’s be honest here, there’s a bit of a learning curve to biking, especially if you’re the first amongst your friends. There isn’t any kind of licensing to biking which is great for accessibility, but also means that there’s no one that’s really responsible for making s...

Photo credit: Danny Albert A grey parking lot sits in the middle of the campus. For one day of the year it gets to shine and yesterday (September 22nd) was that day. I don't know if you had a chance to pass by and see the Car Free Day (CFD) festivities but it was something to look at. There was a dunk tank featuring the boys and girls of the Protection Service, and two SFUO executives (Ted Horton and Tyler Steeves). There was a barbeque, information tables, bike repairs, free yoga sessions, and a farmer's market to top it all off. Unfortunately there wasn't very much traffic moving through the event, which was incidentally held in Parking lot K just beside the residences. There was one other very special thing at the CFD that I was particularly happy about. For this occasion we actually took a parcel of the parking lot and laid down some sod, effectively creating our own new green space. "Destroying a parking lot to create a green space" is what we called it. I e...

uPass! Whoo! Wait, what? Well, let me tell you. If you’re currently not aware, the uPass pilot project will be implemented on uOttawa’s lovely campus this coming September (i.e. next month). It’s an 8 month bus pass being offered at a greatly reduced price to full-time students of the University. The cost is included in your tuition, and you can pick it up starting the 23rd of August, at 9 am, in the couch lounge of UCU. Alright, now you know all the bureaucratic details; what about the practicality? The fact is, with two major bus stops on campus, it’s incredibly easy to get anywhere in the city using public transport. This is useful for running errands, accessing more of the city, and most importantly, getting to and from home. Many students have a lengthy commute to and from campus, so they have no choice but to have a bus pass to begin with; however, now it comes with their tuition! For the others that think this is a bad idea because they live near or on campus, consider this: you...