After an amazing eight months, I am sad to say my co-op term with the Energy and Environment department has come to an end. My time here has been more than anything I could have imagined. It made me realize how important it is to not only be informed, but also educate the ones around you on what day to day steps can be taken to preserve the environment and reduce energy usage.
Tag Archives: recycling
Water tastes better without the plastic
CCSO Green Team admire their new plastic-free water cooler. Nice!
Normally, the CCSO Green team wouldn’t be able to stand in this spot as the space was Continue reading
Cups, Cars, & Co-op
image credit: ux.stackexchange
Hello everyone. Continue reading
Quick Quiz for Inter-Hospital Challenge
Play the 2 minute quiz and help your site win the challenge!
2 kids, 30 boxes and a clean desk drawer
Picture it. You have an emergency message to jot down, so you grab the nearest pen … and it’s dry. So you Continue reading
Guess who’s on the Green Wall of Fame?
You’ve heard of the Oscars, the Grammy’s, the Emmy’s … they may be shiny, but they have nothing on this even bigger honour … the Green Wall of Fame! This is the spot we like to recognize our extra-enthusiastic eco-warriors around UHN. Without further ado, I’m pleased to announce the latest winners….
Congratulations to our amazing Radiation Therapy Green Team! This team, led by Veng Chhin, really works together to green UHN on many levels. To highlight just one thing is difficult, but we’ll focus on their Recycle Rescue operation.
Frustrated by seeing Continue reading
Halloween Candy (and other ingenious ways to recycle)
Special Throwback Thursday, just in time for Halloween (originally published Oct 31, 2012)
image credit: myscienceproject.com
Halloween is one of the most spectacular nights for all kids, big and small. What other holiday encourages you run around your neighbourhood dressed in crazy costumes and go begging for sweets! For some (like my sugar-junkie child), this is the highlight of the year. And it looks like Sandy won’t totally washout the evening….more of a gentle rain.
We normally divide our time handing out candy and escorting our child house to house. Invariably, he comes back with a mixed bag…some great stuff, some meh, and some just gawdawful. For a few years, we didn’t know what to do with the reject candy and it just lay in our cupboard collecting dust. What a sad, sugary waste.
Enter the solution, the scourge of Halloween. That would be the big kids, often taller than me (which is not saying much) that still go trick or treating but don’t bother with a costume. It’s laziness with a side order of menace. Most of us still dole out our precious candy to keep them happy and our house facades egg and toilet-paper-free. Here’s where we finally learned to be creative.
We now go through our son’s bag of candy not only to inspect it (and lets be honest, eat some), but to create the Reject Pile of Ick . We save this pile to dish out to the costumeless teens. How’s that for recycling and reusing? And the timing couldn’t be more perfect since they tend to go out after we’ve already returned. In the end, everyone’s happy. They get candy, we don’t collect waste, AND we don’t get egged (at least, not yet). Such a good idea, it’s worth copying/recycling.
Happy Halloween everyone!
P.S. for extra safety while going trick or treating, attach your bike light to your child’s costume. It makes them more visible and their costumes even more spectacular…definitely worthy of the good candy 🙂.
