Chapter 13- Dump and Run It was a dark, rainy day when the students were given the ultimatum- have your belongings gathered by noon or leave them for the trash yard. The hurried first-years rushed through their residence rooms, collecting their beloved possessions and ditching their less important things. Between threats from parents, annoyed siblings and under watch by residence employees, they only half-scrapped together their lives and left the rest behind as they departed for summer vacation. Clothes that were deemed unfashionable, unfitting, or simply forgotten clung to rez corners and were plucked up and thrown into the trash. Some students made the attempt to give them better homes and placed them with care into the Dump and Run locations. Others just took the lot of stuff they did not want and threw it in black bags and tossed them into the dumpster to die. The dumpster is a dingy and dank place. The black bags and random items comprise the space; and sharp objects pok...

Once a year, the University of Ottawa organizes an event where they recycle, recuperate and reuse students', employees' and the community’s unused clothes, electronics, dishes, food (canned) and other reusable things. This amazing program is called the  Dump and Run . That said, the Office of Campus Sustainability’s goal, among many others, is to promote recycling, community engagement, and most of all waste diversion on campus. Over the years, the event has grown and is becoming a part of the uOttawa experience, partly due to the increase in popularity of the event and partly because of the increase in community and students’ involvement. Now, you are probably wondering why I named this blog "The End of Poverty" since I have not yet discussed poverty. Among the goals mentioned previously, the University of Ottawa wishes to contribute (in their small way) to the end of poverty in the city of Ottawa by promoting this event and leading by example. To fight p...

Une fois par année, lorsque les étudiants quittent les résidences sur le campus, l’Université d’Ottawa organise un événement de récupération de nourriture non-périssable, vêtements, vaisselle et autres articles ménagers. Ce merveilleux événement s’appelle le «Déposez et dégagez». Un parmi plusieurs buts du Bureau du développement durable de l’Université d’Ottawa est de promouvoir l’entraide dans la communauté et surtout la réduction de déchets produits sur le campus. Au fil des ans, le programme connait de plus en plus de succès forcément dû à la hausse de popularité du programme, la hausse de l’implication de la communauté ainsi que le bon travail du département de communication et l’équipe au Bureau du développement durable. Maintenant, vous vous demandez surement pourquoi j’ai intitulé « La fin de la pauvreté» comme titre à un blog qui ne discute que du développement durable. Or, le but du Déposez et dégager, autre que ceux mentionné précédemment est de soutenir notre communa...

I recently joined up for the Bike to Work challenge being hosted by the City of Ottawa. The point is to create a goal about how much you would like to bike to work during the month of May, post your goal on their website, and then work towards that goal. Everything was going really well, I signed up on the site, set my goal.... and then I realized a day later that I have moved and don't bike as much as I used to, In fact, I don't actually need to bike at all to get to work. So now I am stuck in the precarious postilion of in no way being able to meet my cycling goal. This has played heavily on my mind and it got me thinking... what is better for the environment, walking or biking. At first glance you would think walking has biking beat hands down on this one; but maybe not. Resources First consider the amount of stuff that goes into making a bike (frame, pedals, seat, etc.) and maintaining. This number isn't so bad if you consider that amount of time y...

I love the month of May. Apple trees are blooming, lilac trees smell like rainbows and I can party like a rockstar. Why? Because it’s my birthday and what better way to celebrate than with free stuff? Basically, it’s been my birthday all month thanks to Dump N’ Run : shampoo, lip balm, a cute dress, rockin’ heels and some summer reads. Least to say the Dump N’ Run has taken away any prejudice I might have had about receiving free things, hence my impatience to set up the permanent Free Store and my frequent visits to the FreeCycle website. But back to the birthday part. I remembered reading about a girl having spent a day roaming Ottawa for birthday freebies. Not only do I get to wear my favourite dress and receive funny phone calls from relatives, but I can also get free stuff?? AWESOME! Thanks to Google and Yahoo Answers, I managed to track down a few stores I really wanted to visit, besides the obvious restaurants that offer a slice of cake or a drink. Here are a few fun on...

I had a scare a while back in the form of a mysterious phone call... Background: I never get calls at work, mostly because I have a strong distaste for talking on the phone and do all my contacting by email or in person but also because I don’t have a work extension nor a phone plan on my cell (hell, I still have a 519 number from home). This equalled my terror when Jon’s voice floated over the cubicle wall to inform me that someone was on the phone for me. In fact, I thought he was joking. Answering the phone, I had my wavering, stranger voice on to hear a man inquire about a report I had written on Water Fountains on campus. I relaxed a little as he explained that he worked for the Green Education Council of Canada and was interested in setting up a meeting between myself and their CEO to discuss post bottled water ban tactics. ASLDFHEJFKGHY^N%$%[insert excitement here] It just seemed like a great opportunity to showcase the University’s progress as a bottled water free camp...

Mon introduction dans l'univers du mouvement environnemental est assez plate comme histoire : ma tante travaille dans le même édifice que la Saskatchewan Environmental Society . Elle m’avait perçu comme un jeune militant potentiel déjà à l'âge de 11 ou 12 ans, et donc elle m'a amené au boulot un jour. Mon premier souvenir en tant qu’« écologiste officiel » a lui aussi peu d'allure : je siégeais à un comité de planification de ladite organisation sans but lucratif. Je crois que ma première vraie tâche était d'appeler la compagnie qui gère les publicités sur les autobus de Saskatoon (ma voix avait encore à mûrir--la honte). Neuf ans plus tard et je me trouve au Centre de développement durable à l'U d'O. Comme simple bénévole, d'ailleurs. Et un jour, à un atelier, on me demande si je me soumettrais à l'engagement de vivre sans déchets. N'ayant jamais eu l'aptitude qu'a l'individu moyen de dire non, je dis oui. Et voilà ! Deux,...

http://www.sustainable.uottawa.ca/how-can-i-get-involved.html#Take the pledge I took on this challenge with gusto on February 5th - yes, the day of the Superbowl. I made sure the snacks and beverages I prepared were made and served in reusable containers. Then, as an added waste-reduction measure, I sorted through any other materials produced by others and recycled it. One of the best parts of this is that when I pulled a bunch of paper towel out of the garbage to compost it (yeah, garbage picking...it wasn't my finest moment), I found $10!!! Being waste-free really does pay off. As for work, everything I ate had to be packed in reusable containers and transported to and from the office. The hardest part of this was the organics...I had to bring home apple cores and banana peels in order to compost them since there were no bins at work. Everyone in the office thought I was mildly crazy for packing up a container full of organics and encouraging them to do the same, but I ...

I’ve been working on the newsletter for a while now. Trying to make it sexy, easy to read and damn attractive. Besides lathering it in chocolate and honey (the obvious way to make anything attractive), I guess I could work on the design and the content. Move around the columns and rows. Add some flashy colours. Maybe I could add some weird content, for example: “Weird fact of the month: A gorilla can fart ten times louder than a human being”. Would that entice more people to read our newsletter? Or maybe I could do like Cosmo does and add a little corny love story at the bottom that will perpetually end with “to be continued”. If that still doesn't work, we could try a section called “Ten ways to crush compost”, for those who’d rather see old fruit explode. Why am I throwing out so many random ideas? Well, I find it difficult to tell if the content is interesting or not. The content is what I think will interest fellow students. But I don’t know what everyone else wan...

"We are all part of the same compost heap." Let’s face it; Tyler Durden knew his shit- or compost rather. The importance of composting lies at the root of waste diversion (ah ha ha - root, compost = I’m hilarious). We are able to recycle the basics - paper, metal, glass and plastics but the bulk of what is left in most people’s trash is compostable items. I know this because I had the pleasure of sorting through dumpsters and residence rooms after students moved out at the end of April. The main components of student’s (and in all probability the average person’s) trash was compostable (in the form of rotting foods, yum). This surprised me as the campus has a great composting system in place; a campus vermi-composter located near the portables and an off campus mechanical composter, named Oscar, at 200 Lees. This combination of systems allows for 200 tonnes of composting a year. For students in apartment style residences, it is as simple as contacting your residence ...

Spring is now fully upon us, bringing with it an anxiousness to rid oneself of all the habits and possession that we accumulate in the long cold winters. Some students are moving on to new lives having graduated, others may just be moving on to new places, leaving behind their cramped residence rooms, in lieu of less supervised and more spacious digs to live out their future university memories. In any case it has led to an abundance of perfectly good clothes, food, and furniture to end up on roadsides, in dumpsters, and in some cases in our Dump ‘N Run locations. For those of you that haven’t seen the photos, or seen our posts, Dump ‘N Run is a time when we take donations or things we’ve found dumped around the University, sort it, clean it up and then donate it to local charities and shelters, saving hundreds pounds of perfectly good things from ending up in landfill sites. For those of you who have seen the photos and posts, yes we did in fact climb into dumpsters and sort th...

It’s the time of year when the weather is warming up, everything is fresh and new and everyone’s favorite activity comes to mind… Spring cleaning! Here are some quick tips on easy ways you can get rid of clutter, clean up and organize without creating waste. Purge Unused Items  Someone wise once said, “If you haven’t used it in 6 months, you don’t need it.” Maybe it was Oprah. Maybe not. Since we live in an extremely seasonal climate, I stretch this for a year. For me this is mostly a wardrobe purge but look in your closets and under your bed. Are you REALLY going to use that tennis racket that has been lying around for 2 years? Collect all your good but unloved stuff and bring them to the Dump and Run ! You may not be using the seashell adorned photo frame your aunt gave you for graduation but someone out there might just fall in love with it. Don’t forget to look through your cupboards and pantry. Lots of dry goods can keep for extended periods of time but often, if...

I too used to be an optimistic about technology and science. I thought every time there was a problem either technology was going to fix it or science somewhere, we're over 7 billion on the planet, someone is bound to figure it out. - But now, not so much!It seems that there is good progress and bad progress and sometimes it is difficult to differentiate both of them. Here is an example of what I mean: We might have found a way to provide ourselves with basic foods such as vegetables and fruits all year round but it beats the purpose of their consumption: they are loosing their nutritional values (vitamins) because of chemicals used to grow them faster and bigger and the way we harvest them. Moreover, we keep investing in events like " bike for cancer" and "walk for cancer" and so on to get funds to develop more technology and science to find a cure for cancer. Maybe were going in the wrong direction. Maybe it's time to go back to our old habits. Ins...

I love cycling to work every day. It clears my mind, wakes my body and gives me enough time to go from grumpy and groggy to awake and chirpy. I try to be respectful of everyone else (cyclists, cars and pedestrians), as well as respect the basic rule that a bike is like a car when on the street. So I stop at red lights, signal when I’m about to turn or change lanes and always look around. You can imagine my dismay when I got honked at this morning by a man in a dark blue honda merging into my lane is I was going straight on Allumetières (downhill too). I guess I was slowing him down in his merging because he started to honk at me, and had I been lost in my thoughts, I probably would have toppled off my bike (into a mucky puddle). Let’s say it wasn’t a little gentle “beep”. It was more like “BEEEP”. I tried to tell him to wait a minute and to let me change lanes, but he prefered to honk again. I eventually managed to change lanes before he ran me over. The lesson from this? If I...

We just finished up D-Day (a.k.a Dump Day, a.k.a Dump and Run Day) and I really wanted to get this off my chest while it is still fresh on my mind. To all our staff members and volunteers... thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Over the past two days I have personally witnessed sacrifice, dedication, and determination. As a group we have been running around collecting waste from dumpsters, collection tables, private residences, and other nooks / crannies. At times this has been a true test of one's mettle. There have been smells that could wake the Dead. There have been taunts and disapproving stares from community members. There have been cuts; there have been bruises; there have been cramps; and there have been tears. In addressing the group today I said that I was touched. The blood, tears, and sweat shed by this group have not been in vain. We will clean the items collected and we will find them new homes. We will go to shelters and we will go to clinics and we will ...