1st. Tuesday - 10:00 a.m.    Convenor: TBD

Enjoy this virtual interest group from your own comfortable environment. Our goal is to create awareness of everyone’s responsibility to take environmental stewardship personally, to share practical tips and strategies for fulfilling those responsibilities, and to take action wherever possible.  For now, we will post current topics and arrange Zoom sessions on an as-needed schedule.

We depend on our environment:
Our environment depends on us.

November 2025 - We Must Support A Circular Economy

What is the circular economy?

The circular economy is a different way of doing business.

The way our economies extract, use, then dispose of resources is putting pressure on our natural systems, communities, and public health. This is a linear economy—it moves in a straight line from resource extraction to waste disposal. In a circular economy, nothing is waste. The circular economy retains and recovers as much value as possible from resources by reusing, repairing, refurbishing, remanufacturing, repurposing, or recycling products and materials.

It’s about using valuable resources wisely, thinking about waste as a resource instead of a cost, and finding innovative ways to better the environment and the economy.

Reference:  https://www.canada.ca/en/services/environment/conservation/sustainability/circular-economy.html

Video the Circular Economy: More Value. Less Waste (1:18 minutes) A brief introduction to the concept from  Environment and natural resources, Canada

March 2025 

Re-building Our City's Precious Tree Canopy

Trees play a vitally important role in a healthy environment. They shade us from the hot sun, help regulate air temperatures, generate oxygen, absorb rain, and create habitat for diverse wildlife. However, our city's protective tree canopy is getting smaller as forests and woodlots are cut down for development and agriculture, and natural disasters have ripped up mature trees and large swaths of trees in our area.

At present, Ottawa’s tree canopy stands at approximately 31 percent. The ideal would be 40 %.

We plan to help protect it.  The City of Ottawa has a tree planting program that is designed to do help us do that: right here in our own corner of the city

New member of our club Theresa Peluso has been actively involved in environmental issues for the past 30 years. Theresa already has a team of 15 people in different parts of our city who are interested in helping her populate our city parks with more trees.  

To Learn more about this program:

Follow this link to see an Outline of Tree-Planting Plan

For more information or to join in the fun, please contact Theresa at publicity@cfuwkanata.ca

Here are a couple of interesting links from recent news sources that we might use to begin our meeting.  (Many thanks to Alison Hobbs for these links)

• It’s Not Just Seafood: New Study Finds Microplastics in Nearly 90% of Proteins Sampled, Including Plant-Based Meat Alternatives

Researchers at Ocean Conservancy and University of Toronto estimate that American adults could be consuming up to 3.8 million microplastics per year from protein alone 

• How to Reduce Your Exposure to Plastic in Food (and Everywhere Else)
• Ottawa River Keeper - How to Deal with Microfibres

Tackling the Environmental Crisis - Together We can

(This is an archived version of the CFUW webinars from April 2022)
Three webinars developed in collaboration with CFUW Ottawa, CFUW Nepean, and CFUW Kanata (April 2022)