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 ...

The Dump & Run is simultaneously one of the most rewarding and disappointing activities that we have on campus. The event centers around campus move out, during which thousands of students flee the campus to have happy and productive summers back home. The problem is that during their time on campus, these students tend to over consume and then find themselves in the precarious position of having to get rid of their excess stuff in a small window of time. Our office therefore organizes the Dump & Run every spring to try to collect as much of this stuff before it is tossed into the garbage. So on the one hand the whole thing is very rewarding. We get to collect thousands of items (totally almost four tonnes last year) and then donate them to about a dozen charities around Ottawa. We get the satisfaction of knowing that we have diverted waste and helped out those in need. On the other hand though, I estimate that we are only able to capture about 20% of all the w...

The community gardens are back... and just in time cause this snow is killing me. Sunday the community garden group got together for a garden work bee. Thanks to a compost delivery last Friday, there was plenty of work to do. A good part of the day was spent cleaning out old plots, trenching the existing plots, adding some compost, and finally.... gratuitous hi-fives. This marks the 8th consecutive year of community gardening on campus at the University of Ottawa with approximately 50 plots available to staff, students, and community members. Not bad considering the garden originally started out as a small group of 10 students sharing 4 plots. This year, like that last few years, the resources for the garden were provided by Physical Resources Service and the community organizing was provided by OPIRG . And like last year, the plots are open on a first come first serve basis and are free to all those who participate. I am really happy to see the gardens up and running thi...

I get a lot of people asking about both Earth Day and Earth Hour. There is a consensus.... Earth Day is better than Earth Hour. The problem is I just don't believe it. Earth Day is a great day. It was started in 1970 and was famously chosen to be on April 22nd, which was incidentally the birthday of the lead ad agency guy. It was immense and did lead to some very important environmental reforms in the United States and subsequently Canada. It is widely celebrated but recently it has not reached the popularity it enjoyed in the early 70's. Earth Hour is a one hour celebration that asks people from around the world to turn off their lights for one hour as a symbolic gesture demonstrating that we can all play a role in helping the Earth. The problem with Earth Hour is that the event is so small that people tend to diminish the importance of the event. "Oh yeah.... one hour eh? How the hell is that going to help the planet?" So which one is better? Neither, they ...

Congratulations uOttawa; we are RecycleMania Canadian champions for the fourth year in a row! We achieved a 50% waste diversion rate average, and we produced only 14.17 lbs. per person of waste during the 8 weeks of the competition. Overall, with 605 participating Canadian and American institutions we placed 27th; which is pretty amazing considering that most of the institutions that did better than us had under 10,000 students – some even under 1,000. I would like to thank all of you who helped us achieve this by learning to recycle better, bringing their reusable coffee mugs, creating less waste, building waste awareness displays on campus, and especially those of you pledged to live waste-free during RecycleMania; it has a huge impact on the people around you - one of our campus departments was inspired by your stories and decided to do it for a whole week. You are also responsible for inspiring us to create the objective of becoming a zero waste uOttawa by the year 2020; wh...

It’s that time of year again, the time we all dread as students, where our days are filled with the sounds of turning pages, scribbling notes, slurping coffee, and punctuated by breaks for mowing down food. If you are anything like I was in first year while living in rez, you haven’t even started thinking about packing to go home because you have been so stressed with exams. If so, great! This means that when you are last-minute throwing your stuff together that hopefully you will have read this and rather than tossing unloved possessions into a big black garbage bag that instead you will put them aside for the Dump n’ Run. The things you leave behind could include clothes, electronics, kitchenware, office stuff, books, non-perishable food, or anything that is not too large (no big pieces of furniture, Jon’s back is bad as it is) that we will be able to donate to local charities. Last year we managed to pick up 3.18 tonnes of stuff and we hope to surpass that this year in terms of...