Working at the Office of Campus Sustainability, well it’s doing a lot of things, discovering the campus and meeting people passionate about environment and sustainability. In January, when I started working here, I met the uOttawa Green Reps, a program created to make residences more environmentally sustainable. In our first meeting, they had the idea of doing an audit of waste infrastructures in the uOttawa residences. The purpose of this audit was to recognize some of the problems with recycling in residences and to find solutions in order to improve recycling. We got together with the University's waste coordinator to make this audit happen and on March 4th we explored the waste infrastructures of every uOttawa residences. If you were one of those people in residences who saw us taking notes and photos of bins and you were wondering why, now you have your answer. We walked from residences to residences and took the stairs to audit every kitchen and every lounge of every ...

Travailler au Bureau du développement durable, c’est faire beaucoup de choses en même temps, découvrir le campus et rencontrer des personnes tout aussi passionnées d’environnement et de développement durable. Lors de mon premier mois dans cet emploi, j'ai rencontré les éco-ambassadeurs de l’Université d’Ottawa. Le programme d’éco-ambassadeur est créé dans le but de rendre les résidences plus écologiques. Lors de notre rencontre, elles ont eu l’idée de faire une analyse des systèmes de gestion des déchets de toutes les résidences de l’Université d’Ottawa. Cette analyse a pour but de reconnaître les problèmes liés à la gestion des déchets, leur trouver des solutions pour finalement améliorer le système en résidences. Ensembles, nous avons travaillé à mettre le projet sur pied et le 4 mars dernier nous sommes allés explorer les systèmes de gestion de déchets des résidences. Si vous habitez en résidences et que vous vous demandiez ce que nous faisions à prendre des notes et de...

Vous aimeriez avoir un mode de vie zéro-déchet pour quelques semaines… C’EST FANTASTIQUE! Cependant, cela vous paraît difficile ou même impossible? Souvenez-vous que l’objectif n’est pas d’être 100% zéro déchet pour toute la durée du défi…il s’agit simplement de vivre une expérience enrichissante : celle votre aventure vers le zéro déchet! Vous allez apprendre à quel point il peut être facile de faire le changement vers le zéro déchet pour certains items et plus difficile pour d’autres. Cette expérience changera votre mode de vie pour toujours. Je le recommande vraiment! Je l’ai fait trois fois (une fois pendant huit semaines et deux fois pendant dix semaines) et j’ai adoré chaque expérience! Puisque je l’ai déjà fait, je vais vous partager quelques trucs que j’ai acquis à travers le temps. Le plus grand défi sera ce que vous consommez quotidiennement. Vous allez devoir penser à tout ce que vous consommez durant une journée et trouvez une alternative qui ne crée pas de déchet. P...

So, you are thinking about going zero waste for a few weeks; WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY AWESOME! I know it may seem difficult and even impossible, but remember the goal here is not necessarily to be 100% waste-free for the entire challenge... it is about the experience; your journey towards zero waste. You will learn how easy (or difficult) making the switch to zero waste can be for some items. It will be an experience that will change how you think about consumption for the rest of your life. I highly recommend it. I have done it three times myself (once for 8 weeks and twice for 10 weeks), and truly enjoyed my experiences. And since I have done this before, I thought I would share some tips and advice I gathered over the years. The main challenges will be your daily consumables. You might have to stop and think about all the things you consume in a day, and figure out if these products create waste. Take for example chewing gum, is there an alternative that does not create waste? (yes...

An often forgotten dimension of sustainability is that of health. A recent survey on sustainability at uOttawa revealed that when students think about sustainability, they usually think about how it relates to the environment and forget about the the social elements, which include health. Certainly the health aspects of sustainability have been popping up in the news a lot lately, even if we don't immediately link it to the environment. Poor air quality and environmental contaminants related to floods, fires, and climate change come to mind fairly quickly, but there is a silent killer in the room and it is stress related to the environment. The recent phenomenon of climate anxiety is washing over youth like a tidal wave. A 2017 report by the American Psychological Association  suggests that worrying about climate change is having a serious impact on our mental health. And as you can imagine, the more we hear about bad things happening in our environment, the more people worr...

In our Drawing the Line series, we focus on the idea of what it would take to tackle some of the biggest sustainability issues on campus. One of the biggest questions I get is how can we eliminate disposable coffee cups on campus. Normally I tell people that there is legislation coming from the Ontario government that might actually deal with this problem. (check out the Waste Free Ontario Act ). But as the recent climate marches have highlighted, we need action now!! So let's imagine how we could eliminate coffee cups on a campus like that of uOttawa and what that might look like. Let's start with some background... FACT #1 - uOttawa has a disposable coffee cup problem. Every day, about 10,000 (yeah that's ten with three zeroes) disposable coffee cups are purchased and likely tossed on campus. The number is kind of staggering; stacked end to end, these cups would reach more than twice the height of the CN tower. When tossed into garbage bags, well.... let'...