Environmental Sustainability

Waste and recycling

The first rule of waste management is to reduce it. Through our procurement and sustainable food policies, we intend to reduce waste across the campus by 10% by 2021 and build on that thereafter.

We have a legal and moral obligation to reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill so either us or our waste contractors are obliged to separate out as much of the recyclable waste as we can, before the rest of the waste is disposed of. 

We have already met our waste management 2020 targets to achieve 50% on-site segregation of waste for recycling (by weight) and 95% diversion from landfill (by weight).

labels for recycling, general waste and plastic and cans

In order to improve our recycling separation we worked with students and found that they wanted to be better with waste and recycling, but didn't understand how, so we ran a bin signage competition open to staff and students to design new bin signage. "Puzzled?" was the winner with an 84.4% effectiveness rate.

bins with labels on to differentiate between recycling and general waste

The university is mindful of waste management with its outsourced services and the following documents are used for this; Sustainable Procurement Policy (PDF, 384kb), The procurement strategy checklist (PDF, 186kb) and the University’s supplier selection questionnaire (PDF, 137kb).

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