Go Green Universities Action Guide
- Step 1 - Meet, discuss and plan
- Step 2 - How green is your uni?
- Step 3 - Launching the campaign
- Step 4 - Keeping the pressure on
- How your University might respond
- Case study - Nottingham's Campaign
- Sample Campaign Timeline
- How to get your campaign noticed
- Sample letter to the VC
- Ask Robbie: Go Green advice page
The university is one of the handful of universities already practising high environmental performance and is used as a case study in the People & Planet report.
P&P says: Fantastic! However, the number of universities that this applies to is very small. You can check if yours is one of them by using the table in the NEW Going Green Table. And even though yours might be part of this small group, this doesn’t mean that it can’t improve! Environmental management is never finished - it is an ongoing process. Has the university got targets? Are they time bound? Is the university on course to meet them? What are their priorities?
The University already implements all 4 of the key institutional factors.
P&P says: When the Going Green report was being written only 5 universities had adopted all the key factors and were considered to be on the path to excellent environmental performance. Since then a number of universities have made progress towards implementing these institutional changes and have made great strides towards reducing their impact on the environment. However, if your uni claims to have all the Go Green demands in place it may still be worth checking up on this. For example, if the uni says they have an environmental manager, check whether this is a full-time or part-time staff member. Similarly, you may want to find out whether the university’s environmental policy contains strong targets for reducing its energy-use or carbon emissions and if it is easily available to the public.
The University responds with extensive information on its recycling scheme, and bemoaning the fact that students don’t use it properly. The letter suggests that you work together to promote the recycling scheme.
P&P says: Don’t be sidetracked by this! The University hasn’t answered whether it has got the 4 key factors in place, suggesting that it hasn’t! Continue to push on the 4 key factors.
As for the recycling scheme, personal environmental responsibility and general awareness of green issues will increase by running the Go Green campaign in a visible way. We suggest you delay getting into a joint collaboration on the recycling scheme until the university provides satisfactory answers on the 4 key factors.
The other point to bear in mind is that recycling might be one of the university’s smaller negative environmental impacts. What about it’s overall carbon emissions from energy consumption, waste and transport?
The University says: ‘We’re part way there’
P&P says: OK, but if you want to legitimately claim that you are committed to environmental responsibility you need to adopt all 4 factors.
The University says it costs too much.
See the ‘Go Green Advice page’. You’ll also find answers to loads of other questions and you can submit your own Go Green queries by email
The University gets back to you saying that there’s a meeting in 6 months time where the environment is on the agenda, and they will look at the issue then and not before.
Red tape might well be a stalling tactic that the University employs. Talk to the Students’ Union to learn from their experiences about how to get things on the University’s agenda and moving faster. The University might doubt your persistence and think that by saying it will look at the issue in 6 months time that the campaign will go away. You need to show them that you mean business!
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