So I got a lot of comments on my first post about going waste free. Thanks to everyone for all the questions and ideas. I think that the one that kept surfacing the most was around the theme of what is zero waste actually? I thought maybe this would be a great place to start the next installment of this series... If we want to be zero waste, well... "what is waste?" seems like a great place to start. If you have ever had the misfortune of attending one of my presentations you might remember me saying that there is no such thing as waste. This is technically true but not quite practically true. Take Bill Gates and his project to recycle nuclear waste . I think that we could all agree that nuclear waste is pretty high on the list of "difficult things to recycle"... but it is not impossible to recycle or reuse, nothing is given enough time and money. But we aren't really interested in fringe waste, we are interested in the everyday stuff like gum wrappers...

The Waste Free Ontario Act was passed on June 1st and so it is time to start thinking about how the University of Ottawa is going to become a waste free campus. For the faithful followers of the Office of Campus Sustainability you will know that we have been plotting a waste-free campus for years now. Over the past decade, the campus has increased its recycling programs to the tune of a 20% increase in the diversion rate. Lots of cool programs and some pretty decent results across the board. But lately, our campus diversion rate has stagnated. There are a couple of good reasons why the needle hasn't moved on the diversion rate recently. Let's look at a couple of these reasons so that we can figure out a path to becoming a zero waste campus. REDUCING The University of Ottawa is reducing more; instead of purchasing things, we are reusing more stuff or simply not buying it in the first place. This is exactly what happened in the 2014-15 fiscal year whereby the overall s...

uOttawa is one of 10 groups in Ontario being recognized by the Province for Environmental Excellence . In particular, uOttawa is being acknowledged for the Clean Air Community Initiative which works towards: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions Improve air quality and climate change resilience Showcase leadership and best management practices in climate change work Yeah I know, you're asking yourself "So what is a Clean Air Community?" Well let me tell you... a clean air community is a place that values the quality of the air in its space, especially as it related to the health and environmental impacts it can have for those breathing that air. So I am not just talking about greenhouse gas emissions, I am also talking about all the other stuff that gets pumped into the air that can make it less healthy.  This is important for a whole bunch of reasons, not the least of include that idea that dirty air can trigger allergic reactions, can induce asthmatic attacks, an...

We often like to blame our wasteful ways on businesses. Why do they have to have so much packaging? Why do they waste so much during production? Why can’t they make things more durable? These are all very undoubtedly valid points, but we often have trouble taking a hard look at ourselves to see why on the consumer end so much is going to waste. If there is one thing I learned from my Waste Bucket Challenge , it is that my nemesis was never businesses putting this or that thing in 10 inches of plastic packaging, rather my nemesis was my own tendency to live life in a big rush. Always busy! Always on the go! It was always very possible to avoid garbage but as soon as things started getting busy that went out the window. I forgot to tell my waiter to leave the straw behind, I stopped by the corner store for a snack, I went to get groceries but forgot to bring bags. All of these things happen to me on a regular basis but I only realized how wasteful that busy lifestyle may become, eve...

RecycleMania has launched at the University of Ottawa, and indeed around North America, and this year we are using a new tactic that we picked up from our friends over at Penn State Sustainability. It's called Toilet Paper. Basically every 2 weeks we are posting infographics about food waste and recycling in the washroom stalls around campus. The beauty of this approach is that we basically have a captive audience. The downside is that we get complaints about using paper to promote recycling. But rest assured that we did do a lot of thinking before we decided to post paper... Here are our findings. Large Posters vs. Small Posters We considered using large posters to spread the word about food waste and found that because of their positioning on the walls, the visibility of most posters is low and they are rarely read. Numbers vary wildly, but it could be assumed that between 4% and 8% people that pass by a poster will read it. Conversely, nearly 100% of posters posted i...

Every year, the UI GreenMetric University Rankings for sustainability loom over my head. It is kind of a strange feeling really. I know that uOttawa is a leader when it comes to sustainability but sustainability is a broad topic and depending on how you want to measure sustainability, the results could vary. Let me give you an example. uOttawa has amazingly low GHG emissions. Compared to other campuses of our size, we are a third to half the emissions of others. But when it comes to the number of courses that we offer related to sustainability... well we have some but a place like the University of British Columbia or Dalhousie have us beat hands down. Or what about green space? uOttawa has a dense urban campus, meaning that we have a very small energy footprint, but we aren't like Royal Roads who have over 300 hectares or natural forest setting... Which one is more sustainable? I worry about what our score will be not because a bad score will reflect poorly upon our office,...

I am going to talk today about something that happen on the university campus that really frustrate me every time I see it and which is the food waste at the caff by the students. Last year, university of Ottawa renovated the caf and it became open buffet dining hall. All the students were really happy when they found out, but there is something that a lot of people don’t realize and it is the amount of food waste that is coming out of the dining hall! Student are either part of the meal plan or they pay at the door to get in. They get access to an open buffet and they typically put so much food in their plates that most of it ends up in the compost. People are over-consuming, and over-consuming leads to an unsustainable environment. This issue makes me sad and mad at the same time for so many reasons. One of those reasons is that in my religion, and I think in many other religions as well, wasting food is something we are simply not allowed to do. Another reason is that the...

It is official; there are no more disposable fountain drink cups being sold at uOttawa! These have been one of the many items that posed such a challenge since they are not recyclable; they are composed of several different materials and (unlike coffee cups) there is no cost-effective way of separating/reusing them. Not only were they not recyclable, but people often thought they were, which led to them contaminating the metal/plastic/glass category in the recycling stations at food service locations. When there is simply too much of the wrong item in the bin (50%+), we sadly end up throwing it out; either the company leaves it in our garage or the employee just doesn’t have time to go through the bags of recycling and sort the items inside the recycling stations. But as of September 2015, we no longer have to worry about these cups! (Thank you Food Services!) When you aren’t on campus, and do end up coming across a location that still uses these (most fast food locations)...

As part of Waste Reduction Week (October 19-25, 2015), the Office of Campus Sustainability started working on an independent art project, a photographic essay that hoped to document the lives of adherents to a growing, subversive subculture on campus known only as… “mug life”. Okay, so we set up a photo booth at Muggy Mondays, but the photos were still awesome!! Every day the campus needlessly produces over 6000 paper cups; that’s already a lot of waste, but many wind up impossible to recycle as well. “What most people don’t realize is that you can’t recycle one of those paper cups if there’s still coffee in it: if you toss it in the recycling bin and the coffee seeps into the rest of the paper, it can’t be recycled – it becomes waste”, explains Brigitte Morin, Recycling Coordinator. “That’s why it’s really important to dump the coffee out first. Most of the recycling stations on campus have a drain built in to them, below the orange “liquid” sign, for exactly that.” To enc...

Dans le cadre de la Semaine de réduction des déchets, qui s’est déroulée du 19 au 25 octobre 2015, le Bureau du développement durable a entamé un projet artistique indépendant : un essai photographique chroniquant les activités des adeptes à ce mouvement subversif de plus en plus répandu sur le campus, nommé… « la vie de tasse en tasse ». Donc, voilà, nous avons installé une cabine photo aux Matinées caféinées et, croyez-le ou non, les photos sont plutôt géniales!! Mais une cause importante sous-tend ce projet. En effet, savez-vous que chaque jour, plus de 6000 gobelets en carton s’ajoutent aux déchets sur le campus? Un nombre impressionnant, surtout quand on sait qu’ils sont souvent impossibles à recycler. « La plupart des gens ne comprennent pas qu’on ne peut pas recycler ces gobelets s’ils contiennent encore du café », explique Brigitte Morin, coordonnatrice du recyclage. « En plus, si vous le jetez dans le bac à recyclage et que le café imprègne le reste du papie...

Mainstream chocolate typically comes from cocoa plantations in developing countries where workers are exploited and earn a pittance. Many plantations further resort to child labour to provide competitive prices, exploiting those who are forced to work at a young age in order to support their families. I have heard that some children are “sold” to cocoa plantations by relatives, while others are told that the job provides adequate income. These children are subjected to dangerous work conditions that include prolonged exposure to pesticides without protective clothing; heavy, dangerous equipment, whose use violates international labour laws; and even physical abuse. Child labourers are also typically denied access to education, which then continues this cycle of poverty. Camino chocolate comes from cocoa that is grown and harvested by small-scale family farmers in the South. Farmers who work their own land and are part of a co-operative in their regional area. These farmers have an...

By this point in the school year, most of us know how awesome the all-you-can-eat cafeteria is. When you’re starving after cramming for the midterm in the library, being able to relax and re-energize there feels like heaven. The cafeteria can boast that it is Zero Waste with regards to trash, bottles, plastic, metal etc. However, there is one huge culprit of waste that most of us don’t even think about: food waste. While dining trays were eliminated to help reduce over consumption, our dining hall still turns out to be an enormous source of wasted food. To help raise awareness about this issue, the Office of Campus Sustainability and Food Services took on a mission to measure the average amount of food that is thrown out each day. Over a week long period, the average total of food tossed in the compost bins at the caf was a whopping 1,735 food servings per day! That means that every day, around 1147 pounds of avoidable food is simply composted and every 8-month school year appro...

If we are all being honest, I think we can admit that the majority of us have heard of fair trade, have a vague notion of fair trade, but honestly have no idea what fair trade is actually all about. The University of Ottawa was inaugurated as Canada's 7th FairTrade Campus in 2014, thanks largely to the many student volunteers and Food Service employees who pushed to get this designation. I won't go into what it means to be a Fairtrade campus, you can look up all the criteria online . But I will share with you some interesting insight that I gained during Fair Trade Campus Week (FTCW). I was surprised to find out just how important fair trade is to the environmental movement. So you may have already noticed that I keep jumping around the spelling of Fair Trade. This is not a mistake, seriously, it isn't. Fair trade is not the same as Fairtrade. Fair trade is a concept about better prices, decent working conditions and fair terms of trade for farmers and ...

Are you anxious about the new school year? Muggy Mondays has just the thing to make your Monday (and Wednesday) mornings a little bit better! Muggy Mondays offers FREE fair trade coffee, tea, and hot chocolate to anyone who brings a reusable mug. In fact, we gave out 2,289 cups last year! Believe me when I say tremendous effort and love goes into each and every cup of coffee, tea, and hot chocolate we serve. Allow me to pass along just a snapshot of the passion that goes into each mug: VOLUNTEERS Muggy Monday volunteers are small in number, but big in heart. Most of our volunteers don't even drink coffee, seriously like only a quarter of them do, but they still arrive at 7:30am to prepare everything – and they do it with a smile! Their positive attitude will cheer you up even on the darkest and coldest mornings! Interested in volunteering? E-mail us at muggymondaysclub@gmail.com COFFEE All good coffee begins with the beans! Kicking Horse Coffee roasts only the best sh...

You might not know this but when you decide to go bottled water free, you get a lot of criticism from big corporations. More specifically, bottled water companies, who by the way love to send tonnes of letters about why you need to reconsider your decision. So at uOttawa we get lots of these letters. Some nice, some bad, some threatening, some completely incomprehensible. I thought I would let everyone see what it is like when we get one of these letters and how I like to handle them. I personally believe that water should never be denied to people how need it. I is essential to our lives and to our way of life. And don't get me wrong, I do believe that there is a time and place for bottled water and that it does have some very important and very critical applications. I understand big corporations need to eek out a living as well, but sometimes you have to draw a line. As a recovering science student, one of the things I really hate is when people toss a study at you and say...