Did you know that...

Staff and students that use their own mug at one of our cafes in Luton and Bedford, instead of using a disposable cup, are entitled to 10p off the cost of a hot drink?

Thermal Mug offer

To support our students and staff in being greener, for all of Go Green Week will sold University of Bedfordshire branded thermal mugs at a heavily subsidised cost of just £1. The full cost of these mugs are being subsidised by the University to try and reduce the number of disposable cups that are used on campus. The thermal mugs can be bought at cafe outlets at our Luton and Bedford campuses.

Interview with our Head of Sustainability

We interviewed Adam Higgin to find out more about our current green initiatives and our plans for the future.

How can we continue to improve our position in the People and Planet Green League?

Staff can participate by reducing energy consumption by turning off non-essential equipment such as PC’s and monitors and meeting room air conditioning equipment, staff can also help by recycling more. Staff can also raise a Facilities and Estates helpdesk request when they see energy being wasted.

What does the University already do to be greener?

• The University has invested more than £4.5m in carbon reduction since 2008
• We send zero waste to landfill
• We run three 100% electric vehicles
• All of our new buildings are BREEAM excellent rated and therefore have a reduced environmental impact in comparison with a non BREEAM certificated building
• All of our new builds have rainwater harvesting and solar panels to reduce water consumption energy consumption
• We have a sustainability steering group chaired by a member of the University’s executive
• We have an Eco-Campus certified Environmental Management System (Gold)
• We are Fairtrade University accredited, for hospitality catering we are using a re-usable bottled water system rather than single use glass/plastic bottles.

With the use of plastic currently in the media spotlight, are there any things that we are actively doing to reduce our use of plastic on campus and what would you like to see more of in the future?

The University has free tap water dispensing equipment at all university campuses this promotes the use of re-usable water bottles rather than buying bottled water. Personally I’d like to see a complete ban on plastic bottled water in favour of www.canowater.com which uses aluminium cans which are easily recyclable.

What is the University is planning for the future to be greener?

The university is proceeding to Eco-Campus Platinum certification as we are currently at gold certification and we aim to have Platinum by February 2019, We are investing in more solar panels and rainwater harvesting in the new Stem building and investing more capital budget every year into carbon reduction, we are looking to participate in the Warp IT scheme – which is an in-house furniture recycling scheme and at Bedford we are looking to extend the Combined Heat and Power (CHP) based district heating system to the Campus Centre. We are also investigating the possibility of installing a third CHP at Luton to provide low carbon heating and power to the Park Square campus, this would replace the existing 20 year old boilers that are very inefficient. The cost of the University’s third CHP at Luton would be in the region of £1.5 million pounds and would deliver a payback of around 10 years.

What are three things that you would encourage staff and students can start doing today to contribute to our sustainability plans?

• Don’t print documents unless it’s absolutely unavoidable (colour A4 prints cost 10.5 pence)
• Make sure recyclable waste goes in the green bin
• Turn off Audio Video lecterns after lectures have finished.

What took place during Go Green Week?

• Go-Green-Week activities