Chaque fois qu’il y a un déménagement sur le campus; que ce soit permanent ou non, les occupants laissent une quantité inimaginable de choses encore en parfait état à être tout simplement jeté…souvent ils vont se racheter ces mêmes articles en neuf pour leur nouvel espace. La majorité du temps nous parlons de livres, des piles et des piles de papier à recycler, pots de fleurs, cahiers vierges, stylos, gugus organisateurs de bureaux, cadrans, vêtements, etc. C’est terrible; soit les occupants croient qu’il y aura quelqu’un pour nettoyer après eux, ou ils croient que ça ne vaut pas la peine de recycler leurs articles. Peu importe l’intention, je crois que nous sommes tous assez vieux (mature) pour laisser son bureau propre lorsqu’on déménage! Peut-être il devrait y avoir un système de frais pour les employés/profs qui laissent leur bureau malpropre lorsqu’ils quittent – comme en résidence, ou même dans n’importe quel logement loué. Qu’en pensez-vous? Heureusement, nous avons toute...

I wonder if you remember the One Million Acts of Green campaign that was spearheaded by George Strombolopolous a couple of years ago? I thought it was a great idea. Everyone could easily register their act of green and share it with the world. The benefit of doing this of course was that it normalized public commitments to being a more environmentally friendly citizen. Well OMAG (that's the abbreviation just in case you were wondering), is still running strong. It is no longer just associated with the CBC and CISCO Systems; it has grown its own wings and taken flight. The group has been looking to find ways to branch off into new territory and one of the things that they dreamt up is to create a more personalized and interactive app for Facebook. This makes a lot of sense since the whole idea of the OMAG is to share your experiences in the hopes that it will inspire others to do the same. So to that end, the group has partnered up with universities to start creating c...

The day is quickly arriving and it will be a race to the finish. The University of Ottawa is only weeks away from becoming a Fair Trade Certified Campus . That's right, thanks to the hard work of the students at the uOttawa Chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), and the commitment made by Food Services and Charwells, the University of Ottawa will meet the criteria for becoming a Fair Trade Campus hopefully before the holiday season. I really wanted to take a moment to acknowledge this monumental task. First, almost all the heavy lifting was done by one student, Ryan Ward-Davies. He took on the project as a member of the EWB and has worked tirelessly to get the campus certified. Second, I want to acknowledge the work done by Food Services and Chartwells. Getting the campus to become Fair Trade Certified is not as easy as flicking a switch. There were a lot of tough decisions to be taken and sacrifices to be made. So here is the breakdown of what a campus needs to...

And so we begin another round of Community Service Learning courses for the new academic year. Devotees of this blog will remember that we just posted our Annual Report for the Living lab and that we worked with over 500 students last year. This year we not going to be able to do anywhere near as many students, but we will still be working with a bunch. This semester alone, we will be working with 69 students across 6 courses. What are these projects you wonder? I am so glad you asked. A campus sustainability literacy survey - how much do people on our campus know about sustainability? A campus sustainability services survey - are the services we are offering cool or crappy? Sustainability micro projects - 20 small, simple, and affordable projects that could make our campus more sustainable Social justice / sustainability projects - track the life-cycle of a t-shirt and create a campus food map about where the food on campus comes from Case studies about our greatest susta...

When I was a student at the University of Ottawa I spent a lot of my time droning over the courses available in my program. The environment was my thing so I would sit and endlessly read course descriptions in the hopes of finding content that would jump out at me. Imagine how happy I was when I completed my course table full of geeky environmental courses. Now imagine how unhappy I was when I found out that sometimes the profs of those courses didn't share the.... enthusiasm I did for the subject matter. I don't mean to diminish in any way the capacity of those professors to teach, I just think that my expectations were unrealistically high because of all the searching I had done. I was hoping so hard that the professors would be as geeky about the environment as I was. Of course the real problem is that not every prof (in my case) would have been an environmental specialist. In the end the course wasn't the problem, what I really needed to know was the interests ...

For a long time now the University of Ottawa has been struggling with the question of accessibility. It's tough you know. On the physical side of things, there are some really old buildings to contend with. If you take an old building like Tabaret and try to modernize it, you quickly run into more problems (aesthetics, design, structure). An old elevator need to be expanded, counters in the washrooms need to be lowered, and water fountains need to be modified. It is an expensive process. On the mentality side of things, people are forgetful and neglect that there are people who are differently-abled. For example, bulletin boards are still placed a little too high for people in wheel chairs, making the signs almost impossible to read. Sandwhich boards are placed in the middle of the sidewalk (not cool for people who are visually impaired). And videos are made with no descriptive text underneath them. Incidentally, have you tried to use a text reader on a page that isn't opt...

On Friday I had the good fortune of giving a green tour of the campus to some students in a third year environmental-history class. I typically give tours that last between 2 and 3 hours but we were able to condense this one into an hour and 15 minutes. I guess I can talk faster than I thought. Just to giving you a little insight, during these campus green tours I talk a lot about the physical campus, the recycling, energy distribution, and urban planing infrastructure that makes the University of Ottawa a green campus. We visit recycling centres, the vermi composter, the power plant, and even the shuttle bus stop. Anyways, it was on this tour last week that professor Darcy Ingram asked me if all this green infrastructure was listed somewhere. I said that it was available on our green map but I don't think that is what he was looking for. What he really wanted to know about was the narrative. Is the story of our green tour available anywhere? Yes you can go on our awe...

Wow, these past couple of days have been crazy busy. On Tuesday September 4th we launched our special International Students edition of the Free Store. We do this every year to help give international students a leg up on getting the things they need to start out their lives here in Ottawa. Also, we like to make freegans happy. Saying that it was successful would be an understatement. I think I counted about 200 people on the first day before I stopped keeping track. We easy gave away 2 to 3 tonnes of stuff over the course of the two days and I have to tell you that the experience was exhausting. Needless to say I am very proud of the volunteers who came out to lend a hand. And I also want to give a special shout out to our partners (the International Office and Community Life Services) for their continued support. The Free Store is important for a couple of reasons. First, it diverts tonnes of waste from landfill every year. Second, it demonstrates...

Unfortunately the day has come and we have retired our Foursquare account. Things were good while they lasted but now we have to go. The Office of Campus Sustainability will no longer be using Foursquare as a geo-location tool. There are couple of reasons why we are leaving the service (none of which have anything to do with the service provided by Foursquare... they are pretty awesome) but we will still be Green Maps as a tool to map sustainability on campus. Thank you to all the folks out there that contributed to our Foursquare account and who shared our tips. We really do appreciate your interest and we hope to see you again in another social media life. In the meantime, we will be transferring our sustainability 'check-in' tips and lists to the University of Ottawa's main Foursquare account. So don't worry, none of the information will be lost. The Office has had a Green Map account for many years and we hope to soon be launching new features and m...

Yesterday I had the chance to give a presentation to the new Health Promotions ambassadors. The whole thing took place in Terminus and I think things went pretty well. My job was to explain to the group why sustainability was important for the campus and why it was important for one's personal health. In turn, those ambassadors would spread the word around campus over the course of the year (no doubt during the many many many events that they participate in). There are a couple of themes that are really easy to link to health, like food and water. And of course there are a couple that aren't so easy, like energy management and green space. I did my best to fill in those blanks. For example, energy management is directly related to green house gas emissions and air quality. The more energy we burn, the more stuff we dump into the atmosphere, the worse our air quality. Poor air quality leads to a tonne of horrible health effects. Green space and nature deficit dis...

"Knock knock" "Who's there?" "Green rep" "Green Rep who?" "No seriously dude, turn off the light when you go to bed. You're wasting energy. And while you're at it, milk cartons go into the plastics recycling bin... not the paper one." They say that university is one of the big turning points in life. While in university you will likely pick up a lot of the habits and skills that you will carry with for the rest of your life. Fact checking and proper sourcing for sure, but what about those habits that will help our society become more sustainable? There are a tonne of environmental issues out there. I could dedicate the rest of this blog post to them and you wouldn't finish reading until early tomorrow morning. But I can sum up the majority of them with two simple words, 'resource consumption'. The more stuff you use, the more stuff we need to make, the more resources get drained, etc. But did you k...

So you are coming to the University of Ottawa this fall and you want to be as green as humanly possible. Okay, well I am actually certain that this is one of the last things on your mind, with all the panicked packing and trying to squeeze out a couple of more summer moments with the friends and family. But I thought that I might give you a couple of tips for when you get to campus. We are Bottled Water Free here so don't freak out when you get to the caf or the Pivik and start searching around frantically. To facilitate this transition into your new bottled water free lifestyle, the SFUO puts reusable water canteens in every 101 Kit. And if you didn't get a kit, stop by the SFUO's Sustainability Centre and they'll fix you up with a canteen for free. A lot of you are new to Ottawa and are going to bring a bunch of luggage. Pack light ! You are going to be inundated with a tonne of swag and free "stuff". You will have memorabilia coming out the wazoo. S...

Cher (e) candidat (e), je me présente, je m’appelle Katherine et suis la coordonnatrice au développement durable que tu espères remplacer en septembre. Je quitte, le coeur lourd, ce poste que j’aurai occupé un peu plus d’un an. J’ai tout d’abord commencé ici en travaillant sur le rapport STARS, mais fus transférée au poste de communications avec joie. Par la suite, ce poste est vraiment trippant, stimulant et exigeant à la fois. Qui aurait cru que passer du temps sur Twitter ferait partie de ma description de tâche?  Je me suis également occupée de l’e-bulletin mensuel, de faire de la promotion d’événements sur Facebook, ai rencontré des bénévoles sympathiques et traduit des textes jusqu’à ce que je ne puisse plus différencier l’anglais du français. J’ai aussi dû me creuser les méninges à plusieurs reprises afin de pouvoir explorer des styles d’écritures variés pour le site internet et les courriels aux bénévoles. De plus, on ne sait jamais ce qui pourrait arriver au burea...

C’est le temps de l’année; les déménagements…soit vous aménagez dans une résidence (pour la première fois plus chez ses parents!), ou dans votre premier appartement; soit vous changez tout simplement d’appartement ou de maison. Bref, tous ces cas nous encouragent à acheter toutes sortes de belles choses pour décorer notre nouvel espace (je l’admets, j’ai moi-même succombé au catalogue Ikéa une fois ou deux lors de mon premier aménagement en appartement). 8 fois sur 10, ces articles ne sont pas chers, et malheureusement, ne sont pas durables pour plus d’un déménagement…je le sais, mes beaux meubles ne se sont pas bien assemblés lors de mon premier déménagement, et même moins lors du deuxième – mes vêtements tombent à travers les tiroirs et les tapis sont déchiffrés! De plus, et je suis certaine que vous l’avez tous vécu, lorsqu’on vit en colocataire (spécialement avec plus d’une personne)…nos colocataires nous laisse toutes sortes de petits trésors lorsqu’ils déménagent une sema...

J’adore communiquer. Que ce soit à travers Twitter, Facebook ou même par courriel. Heureusement, ces médias sociaux font partie de mes tâches ici au bureau du développement durable. Malheureusement, les petites jasettes en personne sont plutôt rares, car la plupart des étudiants préfèrent travailler ou voyager pendant l’été, plutôt que de nous rendre visite. Parfois, par contre, j’aurai bien envie de pouvoir m’exprimer en plus de 140 caractères. On s’entend que ça limite un peu! Mais on dirait que je ne suis pas la seule à préférer une voix humaine aux ordinateurs, car nous avons maintenant un podcast chaque semaine! Oui oui! Brigitte et moi vous jasons chaque mercredi matin pendant une dizaine de minutes à partir du studio du CHUO. Fermez les yeux et ce sera comme si Deux écolos et un micro étaient dans votre salon! Pendant nos dix minutes de gloire, nous jasons de trucs ayant à trait au campus : des événements trippants, des projets écolos, ainsi que des conseils pratiques. À ...