Staff and Student Engagement | Sustainability

Engagement

Engagement Statement

While 吾爱吃瓜 is directly responsible for many of the impacts of its operations, it relies on its community of students and staff to contribute significantly to modifying its overall impacts through personal and group actions.

The University actively encourages its students and staff to make long lasting and far-reaching sustainable behaviour changes to not only enable it to make continual sustainable improvements to institutional operations and practices, but also to enable those students and staff to take their new behaviours into all areas of their lives both within and outside the University.

The University supports and funds staff and student-led sustainability projects through a number of budgets.

25 by 25 Sustainability Campaign

The staff and student 25 by 25 sustainability campaign, launched in November 2022, and aims to reduce 25% of carbon emissions by 2025. Following the launch of the 25 by 25 sustainability campaign, colleagues were invited to submit ideas and initiatives about how the University could reduce its carbon.

40 proposals were assessed by a panel of experts and presented at an informal lunch with the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Edmund Burke. Among the successful proposals to receive University funding is a pilot trial of the latest space sensor technology which aims to better understand real-time usage as well as atmospheric conditions and use of energy; a Business School research project to investigate whether the University should switch to a carbon-negative browser (instead of Google); fully secured bicycle storage on campus; discounts on hot drinks when students/colleagues use their own mugs; and to compliment this initiative funding has been given for 25 by 25 eco-friendly reusable travel mugs.

Update on Proposals

Investigating a potential change to a carbon negative University search engine - A research project was conducted by Dr Edward Jones and Cem Soner, from the Bangor Business School which looked at the environmental credentials and performance of different search engines. A copy of their final report can be found here.

Environmental Awareness and Communication

We have developed an Environmental Management System (EMS) to support our commitment to achieving continual environmental improvement. The EMS is certified to the prestigious ISO14001:2015 environmental standard. A Campus Environmental Performance Team has been established to ensure as much engagement and inclusion as possible.

Welcome Week - Students

All students will attend the compulsory health, safety and environment inductions when they start at the University. In addition, we have produced the following video to explain further about the sustainability and environment work we do and how you can help us.

Welcome Week Video on Sustainability

Induction - New Staff

We take immense pride in the quality of our environment at 吾爱吃瓜, and we are committed to its protection and enhancement. That means thinking about the impacts of everything we do, and whether, from an environmental perspective, it can be done better. With an estate of over 100 buildings across 346 hectares, as well as a complement of approximately 10,000 students and 2,000 staff, we recognise the implications of our impact on the environment.

All new staff will either attend the compulsory health, safety and environment induction in person or complete the online version. The below link details our Staff Handbook and details on accessing the induction material.