Sustainability Awards

Environmental sustainability of our labs and building is a priority for the department and we are constantly trying to improve our day to day behaviour as well as focusing on some bigger changes that we hope will make long term improvements to the buildings environmental impact.

A team of staff and students have been active since the full return of the buildings use after Covid, by taking part in both the Green Impact Scheme and the LEAF (Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework) Programme. We are pleased to share the results of that work here today.

Grean Impact

We received a Gold Green Impact Award for our building. Many Thanks to Jeanette our receptionist for inputting all of the data and evidence and to everyone in the department for helping us with our planting, reducing our paper printing, turning off lighting, radiators and computers and much more. Thanks also to Ashleigh, our building manager for his work with the Sustainability Team on pushing through some of the bigger changes happening across the building.

LEAF

We are also pleased that Luke Williams and James King volunteered to be our first to submit to the LEAF programme for 8 labs (Rickaby and Cosmidis) as well as the workshop. The labs received the LEAF gold award and the workshop received the LEAF bronze award.

Luke says of the process ‘It was a very eye opening experience, both the LEAF implementation part and the audit. It showed me lots of areas for improvement of sustainability and efficiency. The LEAF criteria implementation was rather simple and the framework offers lots of advice and flexibility. Additionally, the people that run LEAF are incredibly helpful.’ We encourage other labs to take part in LEAF going forwards. Luke and James would be happy to discuss it with you.

You can read the full results brochure from the Sustainability awards here: vc-awards-brochure-2023.pdf (ox.ac.uk)