Objective 4: Environmental Champions

We will promote biodiversity and sustainable food, waste and water consumption and recycling.

We will achieve this objective through four key areas of activity. Firstly, introducing new recycling and waste- reduction targets. Secondly by introducing policies to make our food and water consumption more sustainable. Thirdly, by increasing the biodiversity of our campus. And fourthly, by engaging staff and students as change agents in greening our campus. Our key commitments in this area are summarised below and explained in more detail in the remainder of this section.

Key commitments

  • Recycle 50% of our waste by 2025 (subject to further compositional analysis) and reduce the tonnage of waste produced per student by 10% by 2025
  • Set annual recycling targets for all of our waste streams by August 2022
  • Tender our waste contracts, ensuring appropriate recycling targets and innovation are included within them by December 2022
  • Review of our current bin numbers, locations and signage by December 2021
  • Launch a waste and recycling communications and engagement plan by August 2022 that will enable us to recruit a network of waste champions to help support and promote recycling and create behaviour change
  • Produce policies on plastic and project waste reduction by December 2022
  • Introduce new sustainable food priorities to encourage:

    - sourcing produce from local suppliers

    - better consumer information

    - an increase in net zero cafés

    - a reduction in meat consumption by August 2023

  • Support continued sustainable food production and distribution on campus including the continued redistribution of surplus food
  • Conduct a strategic review of options to improve water sustainability and set water consumption targets by August 2024
  • Publish our draft biodiversity policy by August 2021 and hold a Big Biodiversity Conversation from January 2022 to agree our target for setting aside either 30%, 40% or 50% of the land on campus for nature
  • Engage every member of staff, students – and, where appropriate, community members – in bringing our sustainability vision and strategy to life

Our aims