Waste reduction

There is a need to move away from a “take-make-dispose” model towards a circular economy that includes more reuse, repair, recycling, reducing waste, and better management of resources, ensuring resources remain in use for a much longer period of time before disposal.

To ensure we're achieving the highest environmental standards, we're implementing the EcoCampus Environmental Management System across all our UK campuses. EcoCampus is the environmental management scheme for Higher and Further Education. It's in line with the international management system standard ISO 14001.

Having an Environmental Management System in place ensures we've identified all the possible environmental impacts arising from our operations. We're working to reduce those impacts and eliminate them where possible.

We've achieved the EcoCampus Gold award and we're currently working towards Platinum.

General waste

Suez, our waste contractor, is working with us to help us achieve better environmental outcomes.

Suez takes our waste left over after recycling and processes it under controlled conditions to produce electricity and heat. This is used for many purposes, such as heating thousands of homes or nearby businesses. This is a sustainable way to dispose of waste, rather than sending it to landfill.

Recycling

We also use Suez to dispose of our recycling in an efficient and sustainable way.

Suez has many recycling facilities where they process dry mixed recycling like paper, cardboard, steel and aluminium cans, plastics, and glass. It uses highly efficient technologies to maximise the quality of recycling. Any materials that can't be recycled are turned into fuel rather than sent to landfill.