Green Forest Tasks
Show us that you compost your food scraps. There are a few scenarios that can take place here:
Your concil does collects the food
You have your own compost in your garden/allotment
You are using a shared compost facility (neighbours or community gardens)
You have a wormery
You have tried everything but can`t find anywhere to take your compost to :(
"Clutter is bad for your physical and mental health" Lynne Gilberg, professional organizer.
Can you donate or sell the items you are no longer making use of?
I use a very simple rule: If I haven`t used it in a year, it`s definitely going!
Before and After pictures will work great here.
Have fun!
If you`re not sure where to start, whatch this for inspiration:
Can you find shops that sell bulk items? You can start off by using the Bulk locator app
Buying in bulk reduces packaging waste and there`s a whole movement on this subject called: Zero Waste lifestyle. Thousands of people are aspiring to this lifestyle and it`s all about avoiding packaging.
You can easily start off with Farmers Markets, Lush and Wholefoods shops +many others.
Show us your finds.
We are blessed with drinking water here in the UK and should be grateful for it.
Show us how you avoid buying bottled water.
Check out the vide below:
Are you a frequent flyer? Did you consider offsetting your flights?
One solution here but many other options out there.
Communication is key. Make sure your colleagues know that you are a Sustainability Rep/Champ and that you should be their first point of contact on anything environmental related. You could send a departmental email, announce it at team meetings or put up a poster (kitchen noticeboard, near the printer etc)
The Energy Fairy (you) will reward colleagues who turn off their monitors at the end of the day. This can be done on Fridays for maximum savings. At the end of the day, you will go round and check on the monitors of colleagues who left. If the monitor and computer are off, leave them a candy/chocolate on their desk (maybe with a note to say thank you for turning off). While you`re at it, you can of course turn off anything that was left on.If you`d like a bit of help or have any questions on how to run this, please get in touch. We can help sourcing some chocolate as well!
Surplus of stationery is a common issue in most departments (for us it`s envelopes!).
Items that are no longer needed or have been out of use for a while could be posted on Warp-it (the re-use network for universities). BBK and LSHTm are using this network already. SOAS could rehome these items through SU - students are quite happy with free stationarey. Get in touch with any questions.
If you`ve ever had a personal printer, you might have noticed how tempting it is to just print stuff out without thinking too much about it. All departments that have given this up and switched for a big communal printer have seen reductions in printing. Can you convince colleagues who still have personal printers to give them up?
Ensure that any departmental events (Xmas party, conference etc) have sustainability embeded into their organizing and planning phases.
Examples can include:
no disposables to be used for serving food/drinks
seasonal fruit and vegg
make the defauls option vegetarian with opt in for meat
order a bit less food than number of particiapants
Conduct an internal audit of your bins and waste segregation (ideally over a week).
A few questions to ask yourself:
Do we have enough/too many bins in our area?
Is it clear how waste should be segregated?
Is the recycling contaminated? -by what? (eg. food)
After observing the bins for a few days, draw a conclusion (eg. our department segregates waste corectly 90% of the time). Based on this, decide wether a recycling campaign would be beneficial. If not, announce that your department is doing well at recycling and encourage colleagues to keep it up.
Help us engage with our near neighbours and partners on sustaianbility and create a wider group of sustainability passionates in Bloomsbury. We are officially part of a group of 3 (BBK, SOAS, LSHTM) and informally we work closely with UoL and UCL. Get in touch if you`re interested in this and have any ideas.
We could host sustainability events on different themes and invite other sustainability proffesionals to attend and run workshops on specific themes. Get in touch if this is of interest. We wold love to support any ideas that you`d like to take forward that would benefit the School and neighbouring colleges.