Tag: Sustainability

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August Progression in the Community Allotment

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Our community garden at the Avery Hill campus continues to progress and expand! We now have a beautiful shed where we keep our tools:

painting the shed!

Over the course of the last few week some of the Brassicas crops were badly attacked by nasty cabbage caterpillars. These are often found in large clusters and are easily spotted thanks to their distinctive yellow and black patterns (they can grow up to 2 inches!). Plants should be examinated regularly to prevent the damage or gown under fine mesh netting to stop butterflies laying eggs. Beneficial wasps are particularly effective at controlling these pests, or else they can be picked off by hand. Unfortunately we had to remove some badly damaged plants, such as cabbage and radishes.

leaf damage from cabbage caterpillars

radishes were cleared - because damaged by caterpillars

In the meantime, all of the cucurbits are growing particularly vigorous, they require a lot of space and therefore are expanding out of the bed:

cucurbitaceae family bed

The resuts are some delicious courgettes, pumpkins and squashes coming in different varieties and shapes:

growing courgette

discovering a massive squash hidden among the leaves!

very heavy!!

This summer the weather has been particularly wet and tomatoes and peppers have struggled but are now slowly ripening:

ripening tomatoes

shiny pepper

We also harvested our first carrot!

very long carrot (though a little bit pale!)

We also decided to experiment a bit and sow some peas where potatos and tomatoes used to be. In a rotation system, leguminosae plants (such as peas) follow the “heavy feeders” plants (such as tomatos) which use up a lot of the nutrients in the soil: peas roots in fact will fix nitrogen, promoting soil fertility. August is probably not ideal time to sow peas because they often struggle in cold wet soil – we might have to grow them under cloches. However we hope the weather will be relatively mild until October – just like last year – and even if the plants will not produce many pea pods, they will still function as green manure that improve soil fertility.

sowing peas

We also transplanted some young tiny leeks into another bed:

lifting the leeks cluster - they were closely spaced in this patch of soil

As a general rule, when transplanting young plants it is important to minimize root damage: for this reason we should always handle them by the leaves and try to keep as much soil on the roots as possible.

Pam transplanting the leeks

Before transplanting, we first made 6 inches deep holes, 8 inches apart in the bed; we watered well the group of leeks, these were then divided one by one with the help of a fork; each leek was dropped into a hole and watered in order for the soil to gently settle around the roots.

job done! after transplanting, wilting is common but plants will eventually recover

And finally, some beneficial wildlife: a hoverfly

tiny hoverfly checking on the pumpkins

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4th July Work Day

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While the summer struggles to settle in and the sun is very shy, our garden in Avery Hill is looking good and flourishing with vegetables! We finally see (and taste!) the results as we keep on harvesting the abundant products from the raised beds.

our beautiful garden!

The plants must feel slightly confused with all these weather extremes, with moments of sturdy sunny heat followed by long pouring rain: the rocket for example couldn’t resist and bolted – we had to remove all the flowers!

the rocket flowers as they bolted

However some other plants are doing very well, such as the peas – looking gorgeous!

our pea bush!

lots of peas!

Radishes are growing full of flavour and massive in size

Jon with the radishes

Also the lettuces, Swiss chard and spinach are thriving with abundance in their beds; the brassicaceae (the Cabbage family) bed is also looking very happy with beautiful cabbages and lovely kale (the very Italian Cavolo Nero).

wonderful cabbage

In the meantime, the first tiny tomatoes, marrows and beans made their first appearance and are joyfully getting bigger (yummy!) I’m looking forward to taking my first bite!

tiny courgette growing

our first beans!

Last Wednesday we had a very nice full day of work and achieved big results. The toughest one was moving the mountain of compost from the upper side of the garden down to the compost area. This required a good amount of passion and muscle power, happily donated by our own very strong men James, Julian and Stefan.

While we were all working very hard, this tiny lost frog came to visit:

unexpected visitor

Other tasks involved clearing the beds from the weeds that had peeped out from the ground since last week – such as yarrow and fat hen. These are very common weeds that can grow spontaneously almost everywhere and – although can be annoying if you didn’t want them to be there – can be edible and useful. Fat hen for example tastes nice if eaten raw in salads or cooked in tasty risottos; yarrow flowers can be used in infusions against hay fever and are also important source of food for beneficial insects.

fat hen with radishes

scented yarrow flowers

We carried on transplanting some tomatoes seedlings in one of our solanaceae & cucurbitaceae beds (potato and cucumber families) where also courgettes and aubergine are now growing. We also planted giant sunflowers in the corners of different beds and next to their cousins the Jerusalem Artichokes. These sunflowers will soon look spectacularly tall and will make great companion plants as aphids love them and hopefully will hang about up there, leaving our lovely crops alone, for us to enjoy!

The favourite job of the day was to prune the tomato plants as the smell was so nice! Pruning tomatoes is very easy and extremely beneficial to the plant as it will increase fruit size and quality, while also reducing risks of diseases. The basic method of pruning is to remove the lower leaves at the bottom of the plant and the suckers that grow from the leaf axils, you do this by pinching them with your fingers every 7-10 days throughout the growing season.

the first tiny growing tomatoes!

The less pleasurable task instead was moving the stinky pile of organic matter (mostly grass residues) from the first compartment to the second one, this was bravely carried out by me and Stefan in turns. The key to make good compost is to use a mixture of ingredients: young, moist materials, such as grass clippings, known as “greens”, rot quickly resulting in an unbearable smelly sludge; this is why they need to be mixed with tougher, dry items like old bedding plants – “browns” which add the necessary fibre and a supply of air to give the compost a good structure. These can also be scrap papers and packaging like paper bags or cardboard for example – to provide a good balance. The compost area is one of the most important in a healthy garden. This is where organic matter is broken down by microorganisms and other little creatures, like worms and woodlice, which will provide our soil with all the nutrients our plants need.

the compost area

There is still a lot to do and to be enjoyed at the community garden so for those who want to practice their gardening skills or simply have a breath of fresh air on those working days, come along and join us! We are here every Wednesdays!

our very own special gardeners, Jon and Kat, checking on the vegetables

the gardener's best friend: a ladybird larvae

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Sustainability Awards

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Last week saw the University of Greenwich celebrate its Sustainability Awards for the second year running – the awards bring together staff, students, volunteers and outside organisations that have helped the University in the world of sustainability over the last 12 months.  This year’s event had an extra bit of sheen as the University was also celebrating coming top in the People & Planet University Green League Table published in the Guardian newspaper.

Following requests from the sustainability champions we decided to create a whole day’s worth of events and really give those that had been involved over the last 12 months an experience where they would be able to enjoy themselves, learn something new and feel empowered and energised to take their sustainability efforts to the next level. In the morning we invited the sustainability champions to the lawn at Southwood House where we separated into two groups and headed off to one of two workshops.

Jennifer leads the first group on a forage of Avery Hill

One workshop took the champions on a short walk around the campus led by Jennifer Patterson, from the School of Education, to see what could be foraged from the hedgerows on site. We found a multitude of different plants, some with medicinal qualities and others that fell under the category of ‘tasting good!’ We found marsh mallow Althaea officinalis, red clover Trifolium pratense, elderflower sambucus, fat-hen Chenopodium album and white deadnettle Lamium album among the bushes and hedgerows, some of which made it into a delicious salad prepared for lunch!

The other workshop was led by James Hallybone from Roundfield, who have been designing our community garden, to create a ‘showcase’ raised bed made out of willow and planted with perennial fruits and herbs. Starting with a pile of willow sticks, enormous piles of compost and soil and a few small plants the results by the end of the day were spectacular and a sign of how hard the sustainability champions had worked during the workshops!

James points to the soil and exclaims, 'Make me a raised bed!'

The finished raised bed

Lunch followed, with a delicious spread laid out by Sodexdo, including the foraged flowers, herbs and salad leaves picked in the morning. At this point we were joined by many more members of staff from the University, from members of the senior management team, that we have worked with to secure funds and get agreement and support for university wide projects, members of the Student’s Union, who we will be aiming to help achieve a first Green Impact Student’s Unions award, and staff and students who have been involved in projects from the ISO14001 accreditation to the community garden and everything in between.

Our delicious menu for the day

After lunch we headed out of the sunshine and into the David Fussey building where the Sustainability Team gave a short ‘Prezi’ on what it had taken to get to the top of the Green League and what could almost be described as a sustainability call to arms from Deputy Vice Chancellor Neil Garrod. Neil was looking to impassion and inspire those that were in the room to focus their efforts on sustainability and not to give up or rest on their laurels after the successes of the past few months.

Lunch under the 'marquee'

The awards presentation followed with the sustainability champions collecting awards for each of their departments (see list below for who won what) and a few special awards for people who had been driving sustainability in particular or specialist areas over the course of the year. One award which deserves a special mention is the ‘Environmental Hero’ award for the person who has gone above and beyond the call of duty and really pushed sustainability. This year the winner was Caroline Troy from the NRI who completed more tasks in the Green Impact workbook than anyone else for a second year running, was the only sustainability champion to complete the Laboratories section of the workbook and had also been working hard with the carbon management team to re-vamp the glasshouses on the Medway campus making them much more energy efficient!

Following the awards we had a presentation from Luke Nicholson of Carbon Culture to show some of the pioneering work they have been doing with government departments to encourage behaviour change and deliver carbon savings. The group of champions, staff and students then worked together to come up with ideas and challenges that we could focus on in the next 12 months – giving us a good way to round up the session that had celebrated looking back by looking forward and picking off some of the sustainability actions and targets for next year!

Green Impact Awards:
Working Towards Accreditation:
Procurement (Ian Husson)
Greenwich Facilities Management (Caroline Churchill)
Bronze:
Architecture, Design & Construction (Gesche Heubner)
Computing & Mathematical Sciences (Guy Penwill)
School of Education (Yana Tainsh)
School of Engineering (Ian Cakebread)
Office of Finance (Yuri Panton)
Greenwich Research & Enterprise (Lara Everest)
Vice Chancellor’s Office (Miriam Lakin)
Silver:
Accommodation Office (Heather Lilliman)
School of Business (Mary McCartney)
Central Facilities Management (John Bailey)
Guidance & Employability Team (Ed Paxton)
Human Resources (Anna Radley)
Medway ILS (Karen Worden & Lynn Finnemore)
Medway Student Centre (Angela Ware)
Planning & Statistics (Karl Molden)
Recruitment & Admissions (April Moore)
Avery Hill Student Centre (Amanda Cappuccio)
Student Helpline (Helene Pirsch)
Welfare & Student Support (Sherry Hosein)
Health & Social Care – Psychology (Jim Demetree)
Office of Student Affairs – Executive (Norma Powell)
Gold:
Alumni, Public Relations & Communications (Vicky Noden)
Medway Facilities Management (John Bisbrown)
Avery Hill ILS (Carol Rostek)
Marketing (Fiona Bradley)
Student Finance (Amanda Hatton)
Student Records (Julian Murphy)
Student Records Systems (Sophie Clements)
Platinum & Labs:
Natural Resources Institute (Caroline Troy)
Special Awards:
Student Participation – Sarah Sheikh, Mary McCartney & Business School
Team Award – Avery Hill Porters
Lance Armstrong Award for Cycling – Simon Earp & Neil Garrod
Carbon Reduction Award – Nigel Heugh & Building Services Team
Education for Sustainability Award – Jennifer Patterson
Volunteer of the Year – Linda Marie Schroyen
Championing Biodiversity Award – Chris Powner
Creative Communications Award – Vicky Noden
Positive Deviant Award – Ian Cakebread
Innovation Award – Jim Demetree
Green Transport Award – Guidance & Employability Team
Unsung Hero Award – Sue
Team Award – Portering Team
Hosepipe Ban Award – Grounds Team
Department of the Year – Office of Student Affairs
Environmental Hero Award:
Caroline Troy
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University of Greenwich Tops the People & Planet Green League 2012

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The Sustainability Team are absolutely delighted to announce that we have topped the People & Planet Green League table for 2012. It is a tremendous result that we are extremely proud of at the University!

University of Greenwich Number 1 in the Green league

We were really pleased when we achieved fifth in the table last year and have pressed on working to improve in the areas we were behind in. Since the last table came out we have managed to achieve ISO14001 accreditation for our environmental management system, really gotten under way with some of our biodiversity projects, pushed forward our work to bring together the academics in the University who are teaching and researching sustainability related topics and have seen sustainability finally make its way into the University’s Strategic Plan.

Our Sustainability Champions Network has almost doubled in size since last year and the champions between them have tripled the number of tasks completed as part of the Green Impact project. Last year they completed 561 actions to improve the environmental performance of the university, this year it is over 1,500 – they have also been instrumental in communicating sustainability across the board and embedding it at a local level.

Our Sustainability Champions at last year's awards - this year we are looking for a bigger staircase!

As a result of our good position in the table last year there has been an increase in interest in and knowledge of the work we have been doing, and as the work that we are doing has spread further across the university we have found more and more willing collaborators and innovators.  There are some really exciting research and teaching projects taking place across the schools and offices in the University.

If it wasn’t for all the staff and students at the University who have taken these extra steps and really adopted the philosophy behind our sustainability strategy the result in the Green League would not have been possible.  We owe a lot of thanks to a huge number of people within the institution, a lot of people have played their part people such as our campus Facilities teams including our cleaners and porters dealing with energy, water and waste, the senior managers of the university supporting their sustainability champions, those who get their students involved in sustainability and those in the Vice Chancellor’s Office especially the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Resources- who has supported the ‘positive deviants’ that have been spotted roaming the university’s grounds?!

Positive deviant: a person who does the right thing for sustainability, despite being surrounded by the wrong institutional structures, the wrong processes and stubbornly uncooperative people. And doing it in a way that
brings other people along.
Extracted from: The Positive Deviant: Sustainability Leadership in a Perverse World (Earthscan 2010) by Sara Parkin.

Student volunteers have audited every nook and cranny of the campus, staff champions have got sustainability onto the agenda at hundreds of meetings and not a day goes by without someone at the University contacting us about an idea or an opportunity they have spotted for implementing sustainability in some way across the university.

Lots of new projects have been taking place including our Orchard planting last autumn

Our internal sustainability awards at the University in June will be attended by well over 50 members of staff and students which is testament to how many people there are working towards improving the University’s sustainability performance. It has been a lot of hard work but knowing we are making a positive difference, not only to the environment, but also for the staff and students that live, work and study at the University is the driving force behind the energy that goes into what we do.

P.S. If you haven’t read it – we thoroughly recommend that you read Leith Sharp’s paper on ‘Green campuses: the road from little victories to systemic transformation’. It’s from 2002 but still very relevant and if you’ve ever tried bringing about organisational change in a university it may ring true and for those of you who haven’t tried it it provides a great insight into the complex challenge!

So after a glass or two of Kent’s finest sparkling wine- please raise your glasses and celebrate all those working in sustainability – it’s back to work for the Sustainability Team here at Greenwich-  we still have a long journey ahead of us……

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Two hives from one! Bees at Southwood House

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Last Friday saw our bees at Southwood House in Avery Hill start a swarm and the formation of a new colony. The building services team spotted the bees gathering in a swarm underneath one of the two hives while doing a walk-round check of the campus. After a couple of telephone conversations with our beekeepers, John and Christine Hird (the beekepers for our Southwood House bees) decided to come and visit the bees and see what ought to be done.

Bees swarming on the bottom of the hive

John tries on some of the protective bee keeping clothing

When John and Christine arrived we donned the protective clothing and had a closer look at the swarm that was forming. Bees tend to swarm when they are looking to replace an older queen with a new one and is part of the reproductive cycle of a hive. The hive will create some queen cells and the queen will lay eggs in these, then the hive will stop feeding the queen so that she is lighter and more able to fly. When the old queen leaves the hive (sometimes taking as many as 60% of the bees with her) she will find a resting place while the scouts look for potential new places to form a hive. The scouts go off to look for new loactions and the new location is determined by the level of excitement the scouts communicate about to the hive. This process normally takes around three days and the bees tend to be non-agressive during this time as there is less focus on defending brood.

When we had a closer look at the bees it was clear that this is what they were doing but rather than let the scouts find a new home and lose the swarm of bees John and Christine decided to capture the swarm and place them in a new hive or a ‘nuc’. This would lead to us getting two hives from the one hive that had started swarming. To do this John opened up the hive and started to look to see if the queen was there and look for queen cells. As expected there were a few queen cells and no sign of the queen bee in the hive, this meant the old queen had left and was looking to create a new hive and the remaining bees were looking after the queen cells and brood inside to get a new queen for the old hive. After the hive had been checked we then went to capture the swarm in the nuc.

Checking the hive to see if the queen bee was still inside

Getting a closer look at the bees working on the cells

Normally bees would swarm in a brach of a tree which would then require a litte shake to get them to fall into the new hive but as they were attached to the bottom of the hive this meant we had to take apart the hive and get the nuc right underneath it – with a couple of bashes and a couple of brushes the majority of the bees were in the nuc. The queen went in and soon enough the remaining bees on the bottom of the hive started to diminish as they followed the queen into it. The nuc was then fitted with a couple of frames so that the new hive could stat to form cells for the queen to lay eggs and the hive to bring up some new brood and of course seal off some honey too!

Moving the bees off the base of the hive into the 'nuc'

The nuc - now with the swarm of bees inside along with the old queen

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New Member in the Sustainability Team: Meet Emily Crockford

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Hello all! I am Emily Crockford and I will be working alongside Kat and John as a sustainability projects officer for Greenwich. It is great to be working for Greenwich and to be back in London and I am excited to be involved with all the fantastic projects happening here.

My love of all things environmental started with my love of the book, ‘The Lord of the Rings’. Amongst my teenage love of Legolas the elf there was one moment that really stuck with me: when the Wizard Saruman orders for the trees of Fangorn to be chopped down to fuel the fires of war I remember thinking that it was all an incredible waste, and so the seed of sustainability was planted!

Legolas hear's Emily calling!

My background is in wildlife conservation after studying my degree with the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent; and I then went onto an internship and volunteering with the RSPB on their London Parks House Sparrow project. If there was one thing that I learnt from other conservationists and in my time trying to conserve wildlife it was that climate change was probably going to undo all our good efforts! It was this that finally nudged me over into sustainability and back to the University of Kent to run their Green Impact project for two years.

Emily Litter Picking

Green Impact is a behavioural change projects aimed at staff to increase their pro-environmental behaviours. The same scheme is run at Greenwich so if you have not heard of this before or think you would like to take part get in touch with us and we will tell you all about it.

While at Kent I also took on the role of Environmental Coordinator for nine months which meant I covered a range of sustainability projects from promoting Fairtrade produce to writing procedure for the ISO 14001 environmental management system. Working in sustainability within Higher Education is extremely satisfying as the range of projects available means there is a lot to get stuck into. I have also found that the diversity of people to engage with makes the whole job a lot more interesting.

At Greenwich I will be predominantly working on carbon reduction, especially in regards to engaging staff and students with the carbon management plan. The University of Greenwich has committed to reducing our emissions by 30% (from our 2009/2010 baseline) by 2015/2016 and it will take everyone’s input to hit this target. If you are interested in how you as an individual can help please do get in touch, and I look forward to meeting and working with you all!

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Community Garden at Avery Hill Campus

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It has been an exciting past few weeks at the Avery Hill Campus as the community garden allotment has started to take shape. The garden now has eleven raised beds built, four of them filled with compost, a line of compost bins ready for our waste and a huge pile of compost donated from CJS Plants who occupy the (plant) nursery on the Mansion Site.

We have managed to achieve this in just four work days and the hard work of 25 staff and student volunteers! The garden is very much still in its early stages, and we still haven’t actually planted anything yet but the good news is we will be starting that on Wednesday.

We are going to be joined by Capital Growth who will be taking us through the basic skills required for looking after a community garden and showing us what to plant, how to plant it, when to plant it and where to plant it. We will be taught about companion planting and how certain species of plants work as well together in the vegetable patch as they do in the soup pot! Of course everyone is welcome to come along whether you are a student, staff member, friend, relative or just curious – we will be at the garden from 12noon – 6pm. Email: sustainability@gre.ac.uk to find out more.

The first work day saw ten of us uncover a shot put circle, reveal the base of a burned down shed and build the compost pens from pallets that had been recovered from around the campus. The shot put circle is a legacy from sports fields that used to be on the site, last year we removed the hammer throw to make room for our orchard! The end result can be seen below:

Compost bins built from recycled pallets

The following work day we then focussed towards getting some raised beds built, using second hand scaffold boards salvaged in East London and wooden posts we were able to start constructing the beds. The raised beds are being treated with a non toxic wood preserve which means the beds should survive through the wet weather without starting to rot and break up – the non toxic preserve is chosen specifically to make sure that any preserve leaching into the soil is harmless to any plants and vegetable being grown. The method for building is very simple – driving four coach screws through the boards and into the posts at each corner and while we have made the best effort to make sure the corners are at 90 degree angles apparently the vegetables won’t mind the eccentricities that we may have created!

Constructing the first raised bed

The beds have been set straight on top of the ground and are starting to be filled with compost. The compost will block off the light to the grass below meaning it will die off and start to rot and become part of the compost too. As the beds get worked on and the vegetables grow the soil and nutrients below ground level will eventually become part of the soil the fruit and vegetable plants will be growing into. This means that while the beds may appear quite short and as though you wouldn’t be able to go particularly deep the vegetables and roots of the plants will in fact be going below the ground level.

Loading the compost from the truck into the bed

We are now at a stage where the last few beds need to have the wood preserve painted on them and the rest of the compost beds need to be filled with the compost we have on site. The four of them that are already filled just need some seeds and seedlings planted into them and then for nature to work its magic!

Raised beds ready for filling, painting and planting!

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Julia Raybould: What effect does Sustainability have on a Discount Rate?

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Today Julia Raybould, who has been working tirelessly with the Sustainability Team to help us gain our ISO14001 accreditation for our sustainability management system takes over the blog and gives us an insight into how sustainability relates to economics. Here she focusses on the discount rate, an element from her masters dissertation she did for her MPhil in Environmental Policy at Cambridge.

Julia is leaving the Sustainability Team today and heading for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs but in the few months she has been working with us in the Sustainability Team she has been a driving force in getting our sustainability management system up to ISO14001 standards. We wish her the best of luck in her new role and HMRC can be rest assured they are getting an absolute gem!

Sustainable Economics

Sustainability is said to stand on three pillars – environment, society and economics. The Economics Pillar is often forgotten or is only discussed in the context of cost savings. But, as the economy and economic growth features more in the media and society is scrambling to find solutions to debt and growth on a finite planet, the economic pillar is coming into its own. Think tanks such as the New Economics Foundation and RESOLVE are considering alternative solutions to creating a sustainable economy.

One area where economics and sustainability overlap is in the appraisal of potential sustainability projects – whether this is the purchase of renewable energy technologies or investing in biodiversity initiatives.

The all important discount rate

A critical decision in most financial appraisals is the choice of the discount rate, because this little number has a huge impact on whether long term costs and benefits are considered important. Because of its importance, the ‘correct’ value for a discount rate has been a controversial issue for most of the 20th Century.

But what is a discount rate? It is a value multiplied to the costs and benefits at each period in time over the project’s duration. This enables future and present values to be compared. For example, one pound discounted at a rate of 3.5% in 30 years has a net present value of £0.36 today. Thus, very quickly future benefits can become negligible when high discount rates are used.

On the whole, a high discount rate favours projects with immediate or short returns on investment. Any project with a medium- or long-term payback is shown in an unfavourable light. As environmental investments often have high upfront costs with paybacks over long periods of time, when combined with a high discount rate, these projects will appear financially unsound. However, this is not necessarily the case. If a lower discount rate had been chosen, the same project may appear to be a great investment.

If the discount rate is so influential and yet so subjective, shouldn’t more people consider it when making investment decisions??

In the last ten years, the UK government has stepped up to the challenge. The HM Treasury guidance now requires much lower discount rates to be used for long-term project appraisals.

More dramatically, the Stern Review’s Economics of Climate Change argued that due to climate change’s unique characteristics – impacts that last hundreds of years and potentially causing large-scale damage for future generations – meant that an even lower discount rate, close to zero should be used.

Since the Stern Review, HM Treasury has released additional guidance stating that in the evaluation of projects that will involve “substantial and, for all practical purposes, irreversible wealth transfers between generations” and are very long term (in excess of 50 years) a much lower discount rate is advocated (HM Treasury 2008, p.4). This acknowledges that some projects will impact upon the very wellbeing of future generations and the discount rate should reflect this.

How does this affect you?

When considering future environmental projects at your organisation, it is worth questioning the discount rate used, specifically:

  • For any project with a lifetime greater than 30 years, the argument can be made to use a low discount rate.
  • For very long term projects, e.g. climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity or ecosystem services, a discount rate close to zero matches the UK government’s approach.
  • Finally, it is fair to request a sensitivity analysis of the discount rate be completed for all sustainability investment appraisals. This means that the same analysis is undertaken using different discount rates (low and high). Vastly different results will demonstrate that further deliberation is needed regarding the most appropriate value for the discount rate.

For further information on the government guidance discussed, see HM Treasury’s website: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/green_book_guidance_discounting.htm

Carrot Love

Julia insisted on this picture of carrot love being included in her blog post - so here it is!

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Students Working for Sustainability and Festive Cheer

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This week the Sustainability Team has been finding a little bit of time in between eating mince pies and chocolates to consider the opportunities we have for students working in the Sustainability Office. We met Sarah Sheikh from the Business School, who has been encouraged by Mary McCartney (Business School Sustainability Champion), to find out what we have within the Sustainability Team for students to get involved in.
As usual the Sustainability Team is looking for students to become involved in all sorts of projects relating to a multitude of different subjects. The first position we are offering through the Business School is the position of Fairtrade Intern. With Fairtrade Fortnight coming up in February and March next year there is loads of Fairtrade fun to get involved with and great opportunity for a student to get experience in running events, project management, communications, administration, charity sector work and of course trying out all the latest Fairtrade products – whether it is chocolate, bananas or cotton buds! Sarah will be inviting Business School students to make an application to the role and if you are the lucky chosen student you will get a chance to really get involved and help influence the University’s policies and delivery of Fairtrade events.
Naomi Debrah the 2010/11 Fairtrade Intern
The Sustainability Team will not be stopping there though! We have many more opportunities within the team for all sorts of different things, just last week Stuart Ashenden  in the School of Engineering recruited a student to start auditing the University’s water usage, following on from previous projects completed by students on the University’s energy use and travel. We currently have a couple of students working with Debbie Bartlett in the School of Science on the biodiversity projects going on across the campuses, you may remember Michael Fray providing us with some excellent bee photos while conducting a bee survey at Avery Hill: http://greengreenwich.blogspot.com/2011/04/bees-found-on-campus.html and recently Charmaine Wijemanna presented to the Biodiversity Steering Group on a pioneering new project developing the University’s Campus Management Plan: http://www2.gre.ac.uk/about/news/articles/2011/a2124-landscape-ecology-msc. At the School of Education the students training to be teachers are currently implementing sustainability projects in the schools where they are completeing their placement.
Isabelle Monk collecting for the end-of-term Re-use Project

The Sustainability Team is always keen to make the best use of the amazing resource we have within the student population and we have loads more opportunities whether it is with Fairtrade, biodiversity, waste, communications, event management, water, energy, video making……. anyway you get the picture! Thinking back over the last year the Sustainability Team has been greatly supported by student interns who have all now gone on to graduate and find employment, often with a bit of support from the Sustainability Team as well. Naomi Debrah was our most recent Fairtrade intern, a great personality during Green Week this year and instrumental in gaining the University Fairtrade status. Stefano Maggi has gone onto work for an Australian radio station after being the driving force behind the communications of Green Week, Catherine Brown and Keir Burrows have both found work after helping us with our environmental management system and Isabelle Monk who worked on the end-of-year Re-use scheme went on to get a job in the charity sector and now works at ATD Fourth World.

As well as asking for some new student interns this Christmas we have also noticed that Santa has been starting to consider his environmental impact and the carbon footprint of his work. Ethical Ocean have had a go at measuring Santa’s carbon footprint for him:

Infographic Source: http://tiny99.com/726453  

And Santa also got Futerra to compile an end of year sustainability report for him. http://www.futerra.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Santa_CSR_Report1.pdf

If you are considering how you can have a green Christmas you may want to check out how to ‘upcycle’ a Christmas tree: http://www.upcyclemania.com/

Whatever you are doing this Christmas the Sustainability Team wish you a very merry holiday season and a happy new year: http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/JprvaFyHoYsE1cee

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Bigger, Better but with a Smaller Footprint…..

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Green Impact II: The Sequel

Tuesday saw the launch of the second year of the University’s Green Impact project and Sustainability Champions Network. The project brings together sustainability champions from nearly every department within the University to complete a workbook-full of tasks set to improve the University’s environmental performance.

John tries to explain how much bigger the new workbook is

There are a lot of new sustainability champions joining the network this year bringing the total number of staff members implementing the Green Impact workbook to over 40. The champions will be trying to earn their department either Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum awards before they hand the workbooks in before Easter next year. Joining the various schools and offices in the University taking part in the scheme will also be Hadlow College – one of the University’s partner colleges that is working to reduce their carbon footprint and looking for new initiatives to do this. Sue Brimlow the college’s Sustainability Manager joined us for the event to find out what they could gain from working with Greenwich on implementing Green Impact workbook at Hadlow.

Kat Thorne – Head of Sustainability for the University kicked of proceedings by giving us an overview of sustainability at the University and how the global issues of population growth and increased demand on resources are impacting on the university. This was followed by highlighting some of the key areas of the Sustainability Policy and how the University was implementing them plus emphasising some of the key areas the Sustainability Team will be working on over the next 12 months.

Following Kat was David Young, one of the sustainability champions for IT at the Greenwich campus and self-titled ‘University of Greenwich Quiz Master’ – who’d put together an interactive quiz (Who Wants to be a Millionaire style) just to make sure the sustainability champions were listening to Kat’s speech. Despite a few iffy answers we are pleased to announce that the vast majority got the answers correct. Following the quiz John Bailey the Sustainability Projects Officer for the University went on to explain a few of the ins and outs of how the sustainability champions network works and how the new champions could expect to be communicating the sustainability message across the university.

Charlotte Taylor followed up giving us a national perspective on the NUS Green Impact scheme and showed how it had grown from being a pilot project at Bristol University to being taken up by 48 different universities for this academic year. At the University of Greenwich the sustainability champions completed 561 tasks through the Green Impact scheme and this fantastic number is being repeated all around the country with nearly 4,000 people directly involved and 19,620 tasks completed across the 35 universities that took part last year! That’s a great achievement and just goes to show how we are not alone fighting the sustainability corner but part of a much larger positive movement taking place nationwide!

Neil demonstrates a hire bike Brompton folding away

As well as Neil Garrod giving the champions a sneak preview of the University’s proposed Brompton bike hire scheme (complete with a slick demonstration of how to fold a Brompton bike as if trained by Mr. Brompton himself) he talked about how he’d recently gone back to look at the book on ‘nudge theory’ after recently surfacing on the government’s agenda. He mentioned how the nudge theory applied to the work that the champions are doing across the University and would be key to successfully embedding the behaviour change that is needed in order for the University to achieve its sustainability goals.

Neil has been championing sustainability for over 20 years and cited an example about being viewed as a lone nut while working at a previous university where he tried to bring sustainability onto the agenda through the medium of recycled toilet paper. Neil has seen a change in the support from senior management at the University of Greenwich; he used to be the only one championing sustainability with others claiming that sustainability was not a priority. He now finds himself in the opposite situation with those who used to claim that sustainability is not a priority now championing sustainability themselves. The University’s high score in the People and Planet Green League and the potential savings shown in the carbon management plan have swayed the senior managers and explained to the sustainability champions that they need to understand what sustainability means to those they work with and appeal to their colleagues’ individual agendas. 

Graeme Collie explains the culinary delights on offer

After the morning’s speeches and presentations we were delighted with a sustainable hospitality menu from the university’s caterers ABM Catering. Graeme Collie from ABM explained how the menu had made best use of local, seasonal, organic and free-range or high welfare ingredients and that they were work
ing towards achieving a Silver Food for Life Award after implementing so many positive changes to the menus.

John Bisbrown explaining the results from the first workshop

Sustainability champions discussing some of the challenges ahead

The afternoon was packed full of workshops focused on challenging areas in the workbook and gave the champions a chance to work together to find a practical and pragmatic way of implementing some of the tasks. There was a strong focus on communication – as ever with sustainability – half the task is in how you communicate to your colleagues and win them over to the new practices and behaviours you are trying to implement. Positivity is a key message and focus for sustainability communications and is often far more effective than pedalling the doom and gloom stories. The Green Impact project and the Sustainability Policy and strategy are starting the move towards creating a more efficient university that creates a net positive impact. We finished the workshops with a great video from TED on how to start a movement in less than three minutes and how ‘a lone nut can become a leader’.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf