By Stacy O’Brien
One local woman wants the city to help her expand a composting project to 10 highrise buildings in Ottawa’s downtown core.
In the three years Rosemary Tayler has lived in a highrise on Laurier Avenue, she has convinced residents in 50 of the 195 apartments in her building to participate in composting organic material at the nearby Nanny Goat Hill Community Garden. Everything from eggshells and vegetable scraps to coffee grounds and leaves has gone into the compost bins to be made into soil.
Tayler started the program in July 2001, with a $3,700 grant from TD Canada Trust Friends of the Environment Foundation. She says it isn’t just the environment that has benefited, but the whole neighbourhood.
“The most important thing that composting project did was to create a sense of community,” Tayler says. “It brought people in our building together.”
Now she wants to expand the project to other apartment buildings in her area. To do so, she submitted a grant proposal to the Community Environmental Projects Grants Program.
The grants program is funded by the City of Ottawa and is run by a citizens’ group that decides what proposals receive money. Tayler estimates the cost of her project, for 10 highrises in the Laurier Avenue area, to be $17,000. She wants to start the composting project in April.
“It could help the city take their next step to total waste management recovery,” Tayler says, explaining the city should do something now to avoid needing a new dump later.
Chris Wood, waste diversion project co-ordinator, knows how hard it is to get people to compost and recycle — especially in highrises. “Apartment dwellers often find it more difficult,” he says. “They often don’t have room for the bins.” For composting to work in highrise buildings you need people that are keen, he says.
“There is only one Rosemary Tayler. To apply this plan across the whole city would be very difficult,” Wood says. “The kind of a program she intends is all voluntary and aimed at the keeners, the people who strongly believe in diversion, not for everybody there.”
Wood expects composting in highrises won’t be implemented throughout the city any sooner than 2008. “It’s not something we’re targeting right now but for the long range,” he says.
For now, he’s working on the Compost Plus pilot project. The composting pilot program, which began in October 2001, includes 5,300 households in nine Ottawa neighbourhoods. He says he hopes to roll out the program to homeowners across Ottawa by 2006, but that it depends on city council. There is nearly a 50-per-cent participation rate, according to Wood, among the homeowners in the nine pilot neighbourhoods.
Michael Jordan is one of the participants in the pilot project. A retired principal who lives in the Hunt Club area, he has been involved in the Compost Plus pilot program since the beginning.
“I’ve never understood why the public wasn’t buying into this,” says Jordan. “It’s so natural it’s like brushing your teeth.”
He says he’s disappointed that council is not moving ahead with expanding the composting program this year, as was originally planned. “I do know the budget is the issue. I just hope (council) doesn’t lose sight of the ball.”
He says he feels the most important thing is that people are educated about the issue.
“Remember the old saying, you get more flies with honey than vinegar? Well, the city needs to explain and educate people to get them on board.”
Although Jordan says he realizes it will be more difficult for those in highrise buildings to compost, he suggests apartments could be retrofitted to make composting easier to do and people could brainstorm ways to make the process more user-friendly.
“If we can put people on the moon then we can come up with the technology to get people on board,” he says.
It can, says Marna Zinatelli, an Ottawa psychologist.
“(Younger students’) self-management skills are not as good,” Zinatelli says. “That includes things like getting to sleep at a decent hour, eating properly and not abusing alcohol.” Because they don’t look after themselves as well as they should, Zinatelli explains, many younger students feel more stress. At age 17, big changes can happen in a year, she says.
“It’s not so easy for these young people. Before university it’s hard to prepare and then it becomes trial by fire once they arrive at University.”
Martin also notices younger students have a more difficult time adjusting socially. “The students (out of) Grade 12, at least in the first semester, are feeling very lost on a big campus. For a lot of them it’s their first time away from home.”
Although students’ ages going to university could be a factor in stress levels, especially in Ontario where the school system recently changed, the answer to why students are more stressed out can’t just be a matter of age.
After all, in other parts of Canada and the U.S., students have gone to university at the age of 18 for decades. And it’s not just younger students that are feeling stressed out.
It’s much more likely the pressure has been brought on by changes in society. University, which was once only for an elite few, has now opened up to many more students—at least within the Western world.
With this comes the pressure for students from poorer backgrounds to pay for their education. It also means that there is more competition for jobs once the students graduate.
Carleton history professor Brian McKillop says the pressure on students even forty years ago wasn’t what it is today.
“First of all the pressure for jobs after graduation was not nearly as great, partly because the institutions were much more elite, the students were in a very distinct minority,” McKillop says, explaining that even in the First World War there were only about 6,000 students studying at the University of Toronto.
“So you have this largely middle class elite for which there are enough professional jobs to go around,” McKillop says. “People worried much less about jobs because they were there for the choosing.”
Students are also under pressure to make decisions about their lives that young people never had to face 100 years ago. The transition into adulthood in the 19th century meant a lot less choices, according to Chad Gaffield, a University of Ottawa history professor.
“In the 19th century the tracks or the paths of growing up were simply much fewer and much more well-defined. And what I see in a lot of young people today is coming to grips with the multiplicity of paths that they see before them,” he says.
Gaffield explains that although having so many options can be liberating for students, it can be paralyzing for others. He says the students experience a lot more stress because of the choices they have to make and the expectations that are put on them to succeed in society.
“Nowadays, I think there is just a world of different expectations, and I think the stress that kids sometimes see is that they’re going to do a million different things,” he says. “I think the bar can be quite high in what is considered success.”