Waste Diversion
OSEAN aims to reduce landfill waste by collaborating with neighbors and communities to preserve quality materials, extending landfill lifespan and preserving energy and resources used in production.
Lone Mitten Project
This is a pilot project between OSEAN and Eco West Enders. Every year, hundreds of lost and found bins across Ottawa are filled with individual mittens and gloves that don’t have a partner. Let us know if you have unmatched mittens or want to collect them from local lost and founds.
Mending Circles
We are organizing clinics in January and April for 2025 - check out our events page for details.
For Earth Day in 2024, OSEAN hosted our first free mending circle/clinic, where we partnered volunteers who have experience with sewing with neighbours who have something they want mended. We had a lot of fun and a lot of positive feedback, we hope to continue this program throughout the year. The hope is that we will empower and teach residents how to mend their own clothes to help the damage caused by fast fashion, and also normalize visible mending!
Cloth diaper trial kits & support
Did you know that the average child uses close to 7,000 diapers during their diapering years, and that these will take 500 years to break down in our current landfills? We wants to make it easier for Ottawa-area parents to use cloth diapers, and to thereby keep all that extra plastic waste out of our landfills. Learn more here.
Sock Recycling/Repurposing
For the past three years, OSEAN has organized a community collection of clean socks around Earth Day as part of the Second Cut Project through Smart Wool Canada.
Additionally, we encourage people to think beyond recycling. For example, socks are an excellent fabric for doing mending of holes in pants (especially knees) as they are stretchy, don’t fray and often have great patterns.
Get involved
We are always looking for volunteers to work on these projects, even if its to help store the material!
