A project committed to transforming the campus into a bottled water free zone

Around 3,000 bottles of water are consumed every week on the Université Laval campus but barely 50% of them make it to the recycling bin. In response to this state of affairs, student members of Univert Laval and the Développement et paix de l’Université Laval group decided to pool their efforts so as to raise awareness among the entire university community of the ethical, environmental and economic stakes of bottled water. In setting up a tap water promotional campaign entitled “À Laval, buvons local!” the students hope to turn their campus into a “bottled water free zone.”

The campaign was structured around various different actions including the sale of the SoftBottle, an attractive, foldable and reusable water bottle, the decorating of drinking fountains to make them more visible and the installation of some twenty swan-neck bottle fillers making it easier to refill water bottles, promotional frescos, posters and a petition.

A project committed to increasing the popularity of public transport by making it easier to use

It’s a well-known fact that using public transport helps reduce the negative impact of our actions on the environment. So as to encourage people to use it more often and, above all, to make it easier for them to efficiently plan their trips aboard public transport, Jean-Philippe Jodoin and Alexandre L’Heureux, two students at the Université de Sherbrooke, and Hocine Zebbar, a student at the École polytechnique de Montréal, developed an application for intelligent mobile phones called TransportMontréal. After over 1,000 hours of unremitting work, the students finally launched the first version of TransportMontréal, for Android only, in March 2010. The application’s most outstanding characteristic is that it can be used in offline mode and provides access to all the public transport services in the Greater Montréal Area. In March 2011, the application had been downloaded 13,000 times and had 8,000 active users.