Greening your department

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Greening your department

• Maria Iacovou, ISER

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Acting at a departmental level

• Why bother?
• Isnt our energy better spent campaigning for
  good national and university-wide environmental
  policies?
• My answer
• Where national/institutional policies arent
  (yet) adequate, we can make a difference at
  departmental level
• When good policies are introduced, the department
  is the appropriate level at which to implement
  them.
• Workable size
• People already have working relationships
• Lots of decisions already made at departmental
  level
• Shared resources and facilities

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At the university..

• Lots of isolated things going on
• SU environmental audit People and Planet
  Society
• AFM Steffen Boehm is Unis first Departmental
  Environmental Officer
• Estates energy policy, reviewing purchasing
• Appointment of Transport Policy Co-ordinator
• Initiatives in ISER and other departments
• Attempts to unify these
• Motions to General Assembly, Senate, etc
• Green-circle mailing list
• https//www2.essex.ac.uk/secure/cs/mailinglists/
  - sign up!
• Environmental Forum
• Reps from every department - make sure your
  department has a rep!

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Structural issues

• Within current structures, these attempts get
  lost
• No senior person responsible for environmental
  progress
• No targets
• People Planet recommendations
• Active, public support of senior university
  management
• Full-time staff dedicated to environmental
  management
• A written, publicly available environmental
  policy
• A comprehensive review to investigate all the
  environmental impacts of the institution
• But well worth supporting environmental forum!
• For now, its the best we have
• Model of departmental reps is a good one, and
  likely to remain

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Limitations at departmental level

• In order from easiest to most difficult
• Switching off lights
• Recycling
• IT - computers
• Decisions about travel
• Energy monitoring (unless you have meters)
• Purchasing
• Sourcing energy

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Recycling at ISER

• Paper university collects
• Card
• Glass volunteers collect and place in
  university collection facilities
• Cans
• Plastic bottles
• Batteries
• Compostable waste volunteers collect and
  take to recycling points
• Mailing films
• Tetrapaks
• CDs
• Printer cartridges
• Mobile phones
• Eyeglasses
  volunteers collect and give to charity
• Postage stamps
• Foreign coins

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ISERs change of premises

• 2007 we moved from Rab Butler building to SSRC
• Recycling boxes still in place
• Recycling rates plummeted
• Lesson people need to be told exactly what to
  do, and where to do it.
• Label boxes clearly
• Tell people where they are
• Remind offenders

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How we work together

• We have an environment group
• Now includes ESRC Data Archive
• Open to anyone
• Meets approximately once termly
• Sometimes need to ask other people to do things
• Getting people to listen to you
• The role of lone nutter is quite depressing
• But there has to be more than one
  environmentally-minded person in your department!
• Formalising the system of departmental reps
  can/will help
• Supportive HoD is worth a lot
• Try and get time/space at departmental meetings

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Other initiatives at ISER

• Paper use
• Set defaults to print duplex, 2 pages to a sheet
• Remind people only to print what they need
• Graphs showing paper usage above printers
• Number of pages printed and paper usage from
  printers
• Paper purchased by department
• As soon as recycled paper becomes available,
  well jump at it!
• Cycling
• ISER won the bike2work challenge, but probably
  not due to special efforts
• Cleaning products
• Tried to switch to eco-friendly cleaning products
• Difficult as few eco-friendly products available
  from uni supplier
• Change of department hampered this

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Other ways forward

• Think about monitoring
• Eg, weighing rubbish and recycling
• Thinking about travel
• To and from the uni
• To and from meetings, conferences etc
• Train travel within Europe
• Videoconferencing
• Thinking about energy use
• Light and heat
• Switching off computers at night and when away
• Moving to low-consumption PCs

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For the University

• Energy purchasing and generation
• Catering outlets
• Halls of residence
• Go further with purchasing cleaning products,
  computers
• Continue with transport initiatives
• Thinking about impacts of overseas students
• People and Planet demands

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