The final presentations went really great and I learn’t a lot. Now my opinion is biased but our class did pretty darn good in our final presentations! Below are some of my favourite aspects and topics of peoples presentations.

“The Roots” (Alyssa, Rae, and Gurnoor)

Presented on hydroponics and aquaponics in apartment and office buildings. This would eliminate food waste as well as provide fresh and healthy produce to the tenants of the building. The idea would be that a portion of your rent would go to produce/fish and a tenant who is trained in maintenance and upkeep of hydroponics would care for the hydro/aqua-ponics and would be housed for free in return for there work. Honestly I think this is a great idea, and would be a bit expensive to kick start, but with this idea you could feed a lot of people and do some pretty good work on the climate.

“Making a Local Impact Global”

These guys reiterated a lot of the points brought up in our own presentation surrounding food waste which was great! And their solution was more local to Calgary and working with “Leftovers Calgary” and using the “Charitable Donation Food Act” (Which is only enacted in Alberta) to bring food to those who need it so that food isn’t being wasted. I really liked there presentation because they got in contact with some important people and were able to show how easy it is to make a local impact.

“Meat The Solution” (Marley, Sonja, Kassidy, Brittany)

So Meat The Solution is basically a “clean meat” which is kinda meat grown in a petri dish and all you need is one stem cell (don’t quote me on this) from the meat of your choice and you can keep growing meat forever. Basically a lot more research needs to go into it, but it could be the meat of the future, and would save a lot of animals lives .

“Ready, Set, Grow”

This group was really cool and they designed a kids activity book about compost, recycling, food waste and other green solutions. They shared the “prototype” with everyone which included stuff like a waste log, crosswords, matching the waste to the proper bin. Really interesting way to allow kids to be actively learning. Their book is meant to outline the importance of composting and separating wastes as well as making composting a daily routine. Their target audience is about Grade 1-5, and they were hoping that it would be part of the curriculum throughout the provinces, where a PDF is provided and then teachers can use it in their classes. This was a really great idea and really helps with the focus on education.

“Arctic Aquaponics”

So, Nunavut has the highest food insecurity rate in Canada, and about 1 in 4 people in Nunavut are food insecure. That’s a pretty striking statistic, so what this group has come up with is a aqua/hydro-ponics facility to be built in the capital city, Iqaluit. This would help with food availability, fresher produce, take away much of the hardship of transportation, potentially help bring back culture in that it would help the Inuit people become less dependent and hopefully allow them the leeway to return to some traditional ways, as well as provide jobs. However the biggest problem would be energy. These facilities use a lot of it. So for this project to be put into play, more research would need to be done in Nunavut in regards to the most effective and efficient ways to produce clean energy to be used for these facilities. Otherwise, it’s a great idea and would provide a great deal of empowerment and independence to the locals.

 

Those were just the summaries of some of my favourite presentations which I think would really be beneficial to Canada and the rest of the world. A lot of other great ideas were passed around like bio-domes, and providing more education as well as using technology to help individuals as well as bring awareness to the issues at hand. All in all it was a great day with some incredibly innovative and exciting ideas.