campus we also launched the first ever Fruit Routes recipe book. This is ... with Sustainability at Loughborough Univers
July 2018
Fruit Routes This year the FR Summer event was run over 3 days in the Barefoot Orchard with themed days covering Biodiversity, Food Systems and Climate Change. Alongside the usual opportunities to learn more about the orchards on campus we also launched the first ever Fruit Routes recipe book. This is made up of recipes from previous Bake Off entrants and winners and includes foraging recipes. Copies are free and can be obtained by popping into the Sustainability Office or emailing
[email protected]. There were many activities over the 3 days and all focused on providing opportunities for people to have conversations about some of the more global issues facing us. Sometimes when we consider the truth about climate change, water scarcity, species loss, the migrant crisis, food supplies we find ourselves becoming anxious and we switch off. We really want people to switch back on so that we can find ways to tackle some of these issues together. Connecting a bit more with what is around us in nature, our families and friends, colleagues and pets. Taking time out to be good to ourselves and our environment. All of these things can help us refocus on what is important. For me personally it is very important that I acknowledge how much joy I get daily from the environment. Watching a bumblebee buzzing from flower to flower. Running through the campus woods before work whilst the site is quiet and seeing the light beaming through the trees. Arriving into the office ready to think about how important it is to protect the environment because without it we simply cannot survive. We talked about what we are doing at Loughborough and encouraged people to think about what they might do for positive change themselves. We had great feedback on our campus map with many ideas on changes that could be made. People made pledges about things we have lost and wrote positive statements about what they might do to make the positive change back home and in their lives. I will leave you with the following 3 factoids. We have many more. The time to act is now. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, Damien Carrington/The Guardian Climate change is not a political issue; it’s a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act. That’s a renewable resource. Let’s renew it. Nagourney. Australian Humanities Review, November 2016 Over 95% of our fruit comes from abroad.
Jo Shields, Sustainably Manager
Loughborough Gold As part of our summer Fruit Route event students and staff could register to visit our bee-autiful campus bees! Three groups of students and staff had the opportunity to see the campus bees. They were led by our volunteer bee keepers – Ollie Preedy, Jo Shields, Simon Howroyd and Mick Rennie. Did you know that honey bees fly at a speed of around 25km per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second?! These bees produce our lovely campus made honey – Loughborough Gold. We harvested some of this honey last month. Once we have labelled it we will schedule another honey sale! Follow us on social media for updates on when we will be having the next one!
Picture taken by Ollie Preedy
Loughborough Cup-date The Loughborough Cup is back in stock and is available at all Campus Services’ retail outlets. The cups are available in 3 different colours, pink, purple and cream. The cups are £7, this includes 3x free drink vouchers (which if used on fancier coffee can cover the cost of your cup!) If every member of staff and every student used 5 less disposable cups per year that would be in the region of 100,000 cups less! So why not help us reduce waste on campus and get yourself a cup!
Do you have an interest in Environmental Sustainability? As a member of staff or a student based in London or in Loughborough, if you would like to keep up to date with Sustainability at Loughborough University please join our mailing list. We don't bombard you with emails, but it will give you the opportunity to receive our monthly newsletter direct to your inbox as well as pre notification of any events or offers we have available. Please visit http://bit.ly/2jB6YtM to find out more and sign up. If you prefer, you could always follow our social media: TWITTER @Sustainlboro FACEBOOK LoughboroughUniversitySustainability INSTAGRAM SustainableLboro Or simply visit the website www.lboro.ac.uk/sustainability
The Plastic Challenge Could you go a month without plastic? More than 8 million tons of plastic are dumped in our oceans every year. Half of it comes from disposable plastics that are only used once before being thrown away. The Marine Conservation Society are asking people to try and go plastic free in July! We use single-use plastics for just about everything, from cleaning our teeth (dental floss, interdental sticks and, every 6 months or so, our toothbrushes) and showering, to buying and storing our food and other products. It is durable and lightweight, but it’s these properties that allow it to persist in the environment for hundreds to thousands of years. The Plastic Challenge isn't all about living completely plastic-free - in this day and age that would be pretty near impossible. The aim is for Plastic Challengers to try and reduce their plastic footprint in all sorts of ways.
The Sustainability Team will be giving this a try! Why not join us and give it a go! Find out more here: https://bit.ly/2LJEU62 Download a plastic free living booklet here: https://bit.ly/2suR6Sw
The Team Are Going Low Plastic! Whilst we know it’s going to be difficult to go completely plastic free, the Sustainability team are going to be trying to reduce their single use plastic use during the month of July. Whilst generally as a team we are very conscious of what we are using, we could all do better! Over the next 4 weeks we are going to be trying hard to reduce our reliance of single use plastics! We all have a range of different home lives so what do we thing some of our main challenges may be? Our initial thoughts… Single use plastics for children’s pack lunches and snacks – my kids always loose plastic boxes so I have been using small sandwich bags! Time to revert back to the boxes! Yogurts, can you buy yogurts in anything other than plastic tubs?
Top 4 items you can quit TODAY!
Leaving on a Jet Plane… Should You? The climate is warming in response to rising concentrations of “greenhouse gases”, with carbon dioxide (CO2) the chief offender. The more we emit, the more we expect temperatures to climb, and the more serious the societal consequences may become. International policy makers have recognised this in their aim to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. This aspiration imposes a hard limit on the total CO2 we can emit going forward: to stick to the plan, our remaining “budget” may be as low as 67 gigatonnes of CO2. Whilst this may sound like a lot (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes), it doesn’t go far when you consider that your average trans-Atlantic flight contributes close to two tonnes of CO2 per passenger. A single return flight for all US and UK inhabitants would therefore eat more than 1% of the total budget! Flying is particularly costly for the climate because it is both inefficient (a very high energy demand per passenger kilometre), and it usually involves long-distance travel (a high number of kilometres). To have a vacation that doesn’t cost the Earth, we should be aiming for destinations closer to home, and we should travel to them using energy-efficient modes of transport. Cycling tops the list in that respect, requiring around 40 times less energy per passenger kilometre than a Boeing 727. If you don’t want to travel under your own (pedal) power, buses and then trains (in that order) are most efficient. Your car languishes a long behind – and the gap gets bigger if you’re carrying empty seats. These statements are of cause general, and they refer to energy efficiency rather than CO2 per se, but they can nevertheless help guide our holiday plans. Besides, with weather as fine as the UK is experiencing this summer, what other incentives do we need for a vacation closer to home?
A single return flight for all US and UK inhabitants would eat more than 1% of the total aspirational budget.
With thanks to Dr Tom Matthews, LU Department of Geography.
Spice up your summer holidays with SmartGo… SmartGo is a free to register staff scheme offering unbeatable travel discounts. Why not sign up today to see how you could spice up your summer with SmartGo. Fancy camping? 10% off at anything instore at Halfords, this is on-top of any other instore offers they may have. Or maybe up to 10% off Arriva Bus tickets could make your ‘staycation’ a little more exciting. 50cycles have 10% of Electric Bikes and E-Rider has £100 off electric bikes, scooters or mopeds. Looking for a bike to fit in the car? BeatBike have 25% off Electric Folding bikes. Are you travelling a little further? Enterprise, Europecar and Sixt have between 5-15% of car hire! To register for FREE visit http://www.lboro.ac.uk/services/sustainability/travel/smartgo/
Summer Grounds update These are some of our busiest months in the Gardening department. We have been preparing the flower beds for planting then keeping them weeded and watered. We have also been preparing for the University summer events; Fruit Routes summer programme, Open Days, Loughborough in Bloom judging and Graduation ceremonies, as well as keeping up with routine work. But we have still found the time to help our local wildlife. You will have seen how the baby kestrels are progressing through Kestrel cam, and by the time you read this they will probably have flown the nest. One of the jobs of our Arborists is to pop the babies back in the nest when they fall out, by using the elevated platform. This is a very time consuming task and fortunately we haven’t had to do it too many times this year.
In early June we were alerted to a baby crow which had fallen from the nest. We took it to David Tipping at Corvid Compassion who cared for it for a few days but its injuries were too great for it to survive in the end and it didn’t make it. Not such a sad ending however for the bee swarm we were alerted to at Michael Pearson East. Fortunately the bees chose a Tuesday afternoon on which to swarm and our apiarists were nearby at the campus apiary. They captured the swarm and it was taken to the home of a local beekeeper who had an empty hive. We have planted two herb gardens for kitchens on site, one at Burleigh Court Hotel and one for Faraday dining hall. We chose a selection of hardy herbs that can be used in both food and drinks and look forward to seeing them make their way onto the menus as the herbs flourish and grow.
We regularly have work experience students in our department and in June we welcomed April, a biology student from Gloucester University who is studying the efficacy of ‘Bee and Butterfly’ mixes for her dissertation. She spent a week with the Sustainability team and a week with the Gardens team. During her time with the Sustainability team, she redesigned a collection of leaflets detailing some of the wild species we have on campus and how we can aid their survival. More will follow about the leaflets once they have been produced.
