Sustainable action | Sustainability

Running Monday through Friday last week, Newcastle University Student’s Union (NUSU) collaborated with a wide variety of groups and individuals (including us the Sustainability Team!) to organise an action-packed week of sustainability events. Read on to learn more about the range of engaging and thought provoking sessions put on!

Image: an aerial shot of the Students’ Union building with other campus buildings, Leazes Park, and St
James’ Park in the background. Credit: Elemental Photography.

Monday 19 February

Second-hand Market
To kick off the week, Alex Theodosiou (NUSU’s Activities Officer) organised a market of student-run stalls for our university community to come together and exchange items. Championing reuse and the circular economy, the event helped to find new homes for a variety of items and thus extended their useful lifespans!

Information Stalls/Q&A with Newcastle University
Next, in the nearby King’s Road Boiler House, we in the University’s Sustainability Team hosted a Q&A and information fair on everything sustainability at the University and beyond! Stall holders included Newcastle City Council, the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, and the Student Brewing Society. Additionally, our Q&A panel included sustainability professionals from our team alongside postgraduate students, NUSU representatives, and our Pro-Vice-Chancellor Global and Sustainability, Richard Davies!

Give it a Go: Making Upcycled Crafts Tea Lights
Continuing the circular economy theme of the morning’s second-hand market, Monday finished with an upcycling workshop to create home décor at no cost to the planet! The social was a lovely, relaxed way to wrap up the first day with new people and a chance to get creative.

Tuesday 20 February

Swap Shop
Tuesday began with a return of the popular Swap Shop initiative at NUSU! The event drew colleagues and students from across campus to reduce purchases of new items and instead find new homes for all sorts of clothing via direct swaps. This non-monetary approach was continued at the end, with all unused clothing being donated to local charity shops!

Give it a Go: Charity Shop Tour
Following on perfectly from the morning’s Swap Shop, Tuesday afternoon featured a tour of our favourite charity shops in town and introduced colleagues and students to the range of quality items that can be found when low-impact shopping!

Image: students walk through Armstrong Quad surrounded by greenery. Credit: Nick Figgis.

Wednesday 21 February

Fossil Free Careers Workshop with People and Planet
Offering information and ideas for greener futures, the Fossil Free Careers campaign joined People and Planet to host an engaging workshop on sustainable work and decarbonising the recruitment industry.

Give it a Go: Beach walk and collecting items for upcycling crafting
Wednesday afternoon saw a trip to the coast to explore King Edward’s Bay and Long Sands beach and learn about the valuable crafts materials we’d elsewise simply walk past. The trip included gathering of shells, pebbles, and driftwood, all in preparation for the crafts session on Thursday!

Thursday 22 February

Sustainable Finance with John Adams
The first session on Thursday was a workshop with former banker John Adams on the financial flows and major state and corporate players fuelling climate change. The session widened to include a wide range climate change associated issues and offered food for thought on the ways that the financial and fossil fuels industries can be influenced to reduce their climate destruction.

Give it a Go: Making beach upcycled crafts
The second part to Wednesday’s beach walk, Thursday finished with an upcycling crafts session to transform the resources gathered the day before into stunning decorations!

Friday 23 February

Pond Workshop & Ouseburn Trip with Mike Jeffries
To finish off the week, NUSU Go Volunteer and Eco-soc came together with Professor Mike Jeffries of Northumbria University for a hands-on introduction to small scale freshwater habitats, the biodiversity they support, and how we can create and maintain them in our communities! This session was especially relevant as proposals from the Student Environment and Sustainability Committee for a pond habitat here on campus are currently being considered in plans of projects here at Newcastle University.

A huge thank you to NUSU and everyone who got involved to make this such an incredible week of community building, awareness raising, and sustainable action!

2023 was a busy year for us in the Sustainability Team! We launched projects, ran events, helped the University to score highly in prestigious league tables, and welcomed new team members to continue and expand our work.

Delivering a sustainable Newcastle University is complex and multi-faceted work and requires a great deal of coordination and involvement between teams, colleagues, and students across the University. These efforts have led to sustainability improvements throughout our organisation, making our campus and community better for people and planet in a range of ways – read on for an overview of everything we’ve achieved together!

Image: An aerial shot of campus, featuring the Stephenson and Merz buildings in the foreground. Credit: Elemental Photography

Awards and accreditations

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a key priority for our university and so we were honoured to have contributed to the achievement of some exceptional scores in the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings. In the rankings, which are judged against the SDGs, Newcastle University placed top 25 in the world and 4^th in the UK – a submission which takes a huge effort from our team and colleagues across the University!

That’s not all, however. We also kept our ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 accreditations for our Environmental Management System and Energy Management System, respectively. These technical accreditations reflect the care we put into our high-quality processes for managing the environmental impact of the University’s operations and we’ve now held both accreditations for almost a decade running.

Finally, 10 more labs gained Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) accreditation last year (including 5 at gold level!), doubling the size of our community of environmentally certified labs! If you work in a lab and are interested in joining LEAF, check out the information on our website.

Projects

We began several big projects with our colleagues last year, starting with the next phase of the University’s campus-wide solar photovoltaics (PV) project. This two-year programme will install solar PV panels on 32 academic buildings and accommodation sites, adding to our already expansive renewables network and reducing expected CO₂e emissions by over 380 tonnes a year.

Additionally, we also began the installation of a biofuel combined heat and power (CHP) plant in Merz Court’s Energy Centre. This system uses greener biofuel to generate electricity while also harnessing waste heat to warm up our buildings – greatly reducing carbon emissions as compared to gas systems. These improvements will have a substantial impact as the Energy Centre provides district heating to a whole swathe of the campus, including the: Henry Daysh, Cassie, Stephenson, King Edward VII, Percy, and Old Library Buildings, plus, of course, Merz Court itself!

Image: An aerial shot of the Armstrong Building with the Old Quad, King’s Quad, and Student Forum visible. Credit: Elemental Photography

Engagement and events

Last year was a busy one for sustainability engagement too! Firstly, in January we launched our Sustainability Network to keep colleagues and students up to date on all things sustainability at our university. This community has now grown to 256 members and you can join them here. Additionally, speaking of mailing lists, our ongoing Furniture Reuse project hit 700 members!

Secondly, we’ve been working on this Sustainability blog throughout the year. We posted 30 blogs in all, offering updates, tips, and information on everything from wind power at the University to sustainable hacks around the house.

Finally, 2023 saw a whole range of events with environmentalism at their core, including:

Sustainability Week – five days of sessions covering green infrastructure, climate anxiety and more,
A Veganuary Bake sale to raise funds for biodiversity charities,
Spudfest – a festival offering free food and dedicated to highlighting innovative agricultural research,
Leave Newcastle Happy – our joint campaign with the City Council and Northumbria University to ensure that waste from the student move-out in summer is dealt with responsibly,
The Dr Bike project, launched last summer to support active commuting to campus. In eleven sessions the project has managed to rehome 50 second-hand bikes and helped over 200 people with advice, resources, and repairs!

The team

We’ve seen some exciting changes to the team this last year. Firstly, Melissa Stephenson, previously a Sustainability Officer, became the University’s new Waste Manager – a vital role in the University that she’s quickly got the hang of! Additionally, our team has grown to a total of ten sustainability professionals with the appointment of:

An Assistant Sustainability Officer – Charlotte Robson,
A Sustainability Communications Placement – Evan Bromage,
And two Sustainability Officers – Phoebe Sowerby and Jordan Heeley!

Thank you so much to everyone who got involved with sustainability last year, we couldn’t have done it without you! 2024 will bring fresh challenges and opportunities as we draw ever closer to our 2030 Net Zero target, so stay informed with this blog, the Sustainability Network, and our website and let’s make this year just as good as the last!

Sustainability

Tag Archives: Sustainable action

Sustainability Week: the highlights!