Going for Green Impact
Welcome to EES 13 January 2020
Dr John Waters, Experimental Officer/Deputy School Safety Advisor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences tells us about the success of Green Impact initiatives and how these will be developed throughout 2020.

On the 20th of November 2019 the annual University Green Impact Awards ceremony was held in Whitworth Hall. This year was special as it marked the tenth and final year of Green Impact at the University of Manchester, though that is not to say that the good work will end, nor the awards based on it.
The 10,000 Actions platform has been adjusted to allow team-based activities to be recorded, replacing the office-based Green Impact teams from 2020 and, after a successful trial this year, a system call LEAF – Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework will be used for lab based teams.
The 2019 awards ceremony marked my seventh year involved with the scheme, in which time Earth and Environmental Sciences has gone from entering a Departmental office-based team and one lab team to entering a Departmental team and nine lab teams. With each passing year we have improved our returns slightly, gaining more gold awards and fewer bronzes and silvers, until this year we finally achieved a clean-sweep of 10 gold awards.
Many labs have equipment with high energy demands, like fume cupboards, freezers and ovens, so there are huge potential energy savings to be made through simple measures like keeping fume cupboard sashes closed and minimising the volumes of samples in cold storage. In the basement labs I mostly work in, we buy consumables from stores wherever possible and bulk buy to supply several labs, all of which helps minimise the number of deliveries we need.
The range of actions in office-based teams covers everything from waste management/recycling, travel, teaching and communication of environmental issues. Social responsibility is also an aspect of Green Impact and the Earth and Environmental Sciences team has gained a lot of points over the years from charity events and volunteer sessions in Heaton Park and Fog Lane Park.
If anything, I anticipate that gaining the top awards will only be more difficult in the new system, as the bar is necessarily raised ever higher. The buzz-phrase of the award ceremony was ‘Step It Up,’ which is exactly what Earth and Environmental Sciences and the University of Manchester as a whole need and intend to do.
For more about environmental sustainability efforts at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Manchester, please see the Faculty social responsibility pages.
energy savingsenvironmentgreen impactlabsofficesresourcessustainability
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