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Sustainable Student Stress Syndrome: Green Moving Guide

Are you a student? Are you stuck doing that thing where you pack your life into boxes and relocate to another place in the near future? Are you stressed and overridden with tonnes of stuff that you realize you don’t really need in your new place? (If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should probably continue reading. If not, maybe read anyways or continue browsing this blog for something more applicable to you.) Moving sucks, the effort that is required to sort through your junk and meticulously wrap your breakables is an arduous task at best. Hopefully some of these tips will help make the process a bit easier. 1. Gather the necessary packing equipment  DOs: Boxes- can be found on campus in “cardboard” recycling bins, be sure to recycle them after/give to others in the moving process! Crates- ask local stores (such as grocery stores) if they have any that you can borrow, some are surprisingly friendly if you offer to put a “deposit” down Grocery Ba...

Top 5 Ways to Save Energy on Campus

When I was an undergraduate student at uOttawa I was really excited when the government of Canada launched the doomed 1 Tonne Challenge program . The program had only good intentions but it completely and utterly failed to be inclusive. As a student there were a bunch of things that were being suggested by the program that I just couldn't do. Buy an efficient furnace or car, insulate my house, purchase offsets?!?!? I didn't own a home, couldn't afford a car, and what the hell was an offset? Since then I have always had a hate on for things marketed to students that students have no control over. If I told you to turn down the heat in your classroom, would you even be able to do it? So here is a list of 5 actual things that you can do on campus to reduce the campuses environmental footprint. Don't use the elevator when you don't have to  I never understood why people didn't get this but elevators suck their fair share of energy. On a floor by floor basis...

Recyclage des meubles - le déchet d’un, le trésor d’un autre…

Avez-vous déjà remarqué, lors des grands déménagements (mai, juillet et septembre) tous les meubles qui sont laissés à ramasser et jeter par la ville? J’en suis certaine! C’est le même cas sur le campus de l'université d'Ottawa; lors de grands déménagements ou rénovations, l’Université se débarrasse presque toujours des meubles. Ces meubles se sont fait jetés; jusqu’au jour où nous avons commencé le programme de recyclage de meubles. Le Programme de recyclage des meubles (PRM) a été instauré en 2008 dans le cadre d’un projet pilote visant à évaluer le potentiel que pouvaient offrir la réutilisation et le recyclage des meubles sur le campus. Après l’acquisition de la propriété située au 200, avenue Lees à la fin de 2007, l’Université s’est retrouvée avec une grande quantité de meubles qui avaient été laissés dans l’immeuble. Au lieu de jeter ces meubles et d’en assumer le coût connexe, le Bureau du développement durable (BDD) et le Service des immeubles (SDI) ont examiné la...

Sustainability Badges for Foursquare

I, Merissa Mueller, am the conqueror of cartography, maker of maps, artist of the atlas, and most recently the foursquare flunky. See, I’m new to foursquare. I have heard of it, mostly because sometimes on Facebook my homepage decides to tell me the locations of my drunken friends. Other than that, the concept is quite familiar because of my work with mapping but I had no experience with it until recently. I had created a foursquare account quite a while back for the office to which I added “lists” entailing where on and off campus you should visit along with a short “tip” about the building/location. Since I have no access to a smart phone (hell, I don’t even have a real calling plan on my crappy phone, just texting) I couldn’t go much further with our profile than that. I could not “check in” to places, upload photos to my profile, become the “mayor” of a spot and most unfortunately, I could not earn a single badge which made me feel horrible. I mean, even if you’re crappy at ...

Composicle: the ultimate way to compost

I was mobbed by a group of onlookers with a bunch of questions at my condo today. My crime?....having discovered the most amazing way to compost. (note to reader, I didn't actually discover it but I fancy myself a pioneer) Let me start this post by saying that I understand that composting is hard. It's not like recycling. Recycling means you put one thing into a container and voila, nice and easy. There are no odours, there are no bugs, and you can recycle almost everywhere. No so for composting, and in my case composting is doubly difficult because condos in Ottawa don't have a standard composting system. These creates three possible solutions. The first is to become a composting ninja. Wake up super early and find a house somewhere in your neighbourhood that composts. Quietly, without waking anybody up or drawing too much attention to yourself, open up their compost bin and depose the goods. Full disclosure, I have been caught doing this once before and I can tell ...

The end of one era is the beginning of another

This past week the University of Ottawa installed new exterior recycling bins on campus. Now I promised myself I wouldn't cry so please bare with me while I pay homage to the old bins before getting on to the new ones. I really liked the old exterior recycling bins that we had on campus. Yeah they had there short-comings; they broke really easily, they were separated bins (I'll talk about that I a minute), and quite frankly they weren't a very good design. But they also represented one of the first real risks that we took to improve recycling on campus. Unlike any bin before it, and unlike the new bins, the old bins were transparent, you could actually see right through them. I know this doesn't seem like anything new today, considering Toronto is littered with transparent bins, but when we installed those old bins on campus, to my knowledge we were the first in Ottawa. Of course the benefit of doing this is that the transparent bin forces people to put things i...

I want to be green at festivals, but....

Summer is an amazing time of the year, complete the sunshine we crave on those cold winter days, ice cream cones, beach days, and music festivals. Every summer I find myself having to carefully budget my finances to allow myself enough disposable income to see my favourite bands play at various different music festivals across this part of the country. Every genre you can imagine finds itself on display in front of heat stroked fans, who in some cases have been camping out in tents in the rain for days taking in the sights and sounds and atmosphere of the music festival scene. Now a days there seems to be a festival every weekend, and at a growing cost to festival goers. Festivals fight to bring in the hottest bands from around the world, they set up stands to sell over priced food, and drinks, whilst preventing you from bringing in your own. They encourage you to drive, bus, train, and fly from wherever you are, to attend the best, biggest, and hippest festival of the summer....

Mobile Community Garden Plots

Let's talk about last summer. Last summer we inaugurated the community garden in its new space at 649 King Edward (that's right, we won the lottery with that space). It replaced the old location which has become the building footprint for the CAPEA building. Thirty five glorious plots to serve the campus community, not bad. But we already knew that we wouldn't have enough space to meet the demand of the campus and the Sandy Hill community. So while discussing the issue with the Director of Physical Resources Service , he mentioned how McGill University was toying around with the idea of having planters that could be moved around when needed. Mobile gardens... brilliant! So the group got together and we talked about want this could look like. We had a few ideas but unfortunately there were so many things to do to get our current community garden off the ground, that we quickly forgot about the mobile gardens idea. That is until an opportunity to look at them again ...

Experimenting with the Health of Our Lakes

From the humble beginnings of researchers working out of dilapidated trailers, using plywood and tarps to keep the rain off, to the emergence of a modest but highly sophisticated research facility; the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) has transformed our knowledge of freshwater ecosystems, and produced an impressive body of research; the depth and completeness of which cannot be found elsewhere in the world. Since its creation in 1968 the ELA has faced funding cuts 3 times, previous to the government's most recent cut in the now infamous omnibus bill C-38. The ELAs research has contributed substantially to our understanding of managing algal blooms, acid rain, climate change, mercury pollution, greenhouse gas fluxes from hydroelectric reservoirs, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Dr. Schindler , a renowned scientist in his field was on campus recently, speaking to the importance of preserving this essential research body. Disruptions to funding and research, he argued, compr...

There is regret, there is deep regret, and then there is the Emerald Ash Borer

Last summer I wrote about my project concerning the Emerald Ash Borers in Sandy Hill- mostly how Jon pimped me out to a prof and his student to look into the situation (because of my mapping expertise). I spent some time hitting the pavement, plotting out where the ash trees were, and locating spaces to plant new trees to replace the canopy cover that would be eliminated by this pesky invasive species. After identifying the areas, we went door to door and spoke to residents about planting a tree on their property with the help of a City grant. It went pretty well, I had some neat conversations with residents, I was able to breathe some fresh air, and I had a change of scenery from the office. It was great to be done with that project, knowing that the Action Sandy Hill community group had my finalized map in their hands. Effectively they could go about informing more residents and even inoculating trees that were significant to the community and had shown no signs of infection. Ino...

A Real Life Free Store

Ten years ago when I was a student at the University of Ottawa, I had this magical dream of something called a Free Store. I had heard from my friends that Carleton University had one and I instantly had to have one on my campus. I had never seen one for myself but I imagined that this incredible space would house row upon row of all manner of useful items. The walls would be adorned with beautifully framed pictures, the floors we be flooded with thick velvety carpets, and I would be able to spend hours just sifting through the sea of one of a kind knick-knacks. Did I ever feel like a tool when I saw that the Free Store was nothing more than 5 boxes in the corner of a small student office. Apparently when there were enough people, they would put the boxes on the desk to make them easier to rummage through. Pfft, I was crushed. So a year later OPIRG hosted a Clothing Swap at the University of Ottawa. It was fun, there were at least 8 garbage bags worth of clothes and one rack to han...

Unsustainable

There are many examples of unsustainable things going on in the world and here are a few I’ve read about or seen going on in Canada. Unsustainable, the amount of pressure we put on the soil for commercial clear cutting of forests; soil can no longer retain water thus the landscape is destroyed. Unsustainable, one of the world’s dirtiest industries, “the oil sands production generates three times the greenhouse gas emission as a barrel of conventional oil”*. Up to 4 barrels of water are used to produce 1 barrel of tar sand oil “resulting in gigantic tailings [pools] of toxic waste that can be seen from outer space by the naked eye”**. This water is drained from the Athabasca (which in Cree means where there are plants one after another - will we have to change the name soon?) River in Alberta. Unsustainable, our Canadian mining industry is among the biggest in the world and also involved in 33% of mining conflicts (whether “taking over land abroad and polluting water sources, destro...

Wunderkammer

L’été est la saison pour le ménage intense, les boutiques dans le marcher By et la sangria dans le jardin. Si l’on désire marier ménage et boutiques, je vous recommande d’aller faire un tour au Wunderkammer sur la rue Dalhousie. C’est une boutique éclectique, inétressante et toujour surprenante. The store’s efforts to re-use vintage jewellery and leather goes to show how being green can actually be very cool. If you have some old jewellery, accessories or even wallpaper hanging around your house or apartment, the artists would love to have it. And you could get up to 30% off your purchase. How can anyone resist that? And the staff/artists are absolutely fabulous. Upon calling the store, I had a great conversation with Nathan who was nice enough to take the time to explain the whole concept of the Spring Cleaning Event happening on June 14th, from 6 - 9 pm. The whole idea of the swapping sale began with the artists going to the United States to dig up vintage components in or...

Sustainable Zombie Apocalypse Survival Kit

In lieu of the recent Zombie outbreak in Miami Florida, we here at the Office of Campus Sustainability , are taking all measures to ensure our safe and sustainable future. We have decided to share with you tips to creating your own sustainable Zombie Apocalypse Survival Kit (some items available at the Free Store ). Basic Tools and Supplies Water: Keeping in mind issues with water depletion and privatization, we suggest purchasing a water filtration device. This not only provides you with greater access to water sources, but the freedom from heavy and burdensome packs of water. One gallon of water per person per day for at least three days, for drinking and sanitation is recommended. Luckily filters can be used numerous times before being replaced. Think about how much faster you’ll be escaping those Zombies now! Food: Local is the way for your gourmet meals on the go! So in preparation for the upcoming Zombie apocalypse head to your local farmers market and find your fav...

Upcyclin’ the Student Life

In lieu of Jon’s recent blog on turning  wooden pallets into furniture , I decided to write my own blog on sustainable student living. Mostly because I have found myself since I started university to be very anti-Ikea. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am sure the Swedes have a lot of unique, mass produced, and cheap furniture to adorn your apartment with (you may sense some sarcasm and contradictions, I apologize Ikea lovers) but maybe I am just too crafty or cheap to commit to buying things. Thus, I have upcycled many a thing since I’ve moved to Ottawa. My tips : Find friends that are moving, or strangers, around the end of the month and pester them for shit they don’t feel like carrying to a new place, or scour the streets on the night before garbage day .This is how I have acquired the majority of my stuff; whether coming across it randomly when walking home or through friends that had no interest in packing it away and transporting it. Once you have found some stuff, customi...