Author: kcl sustainability (Page 12 of 12)

Recap panel discussion: a sustainable future – mission possible?

March 3, 2014 /

Green Week 2014 was an action packed week. There were events scheduled at every campus in order to reach out to as many people as possible. One of the concluding events of the Green Week was the panel discussion at Strand. The topic was ‘A GGW_logo_web.imdex12443sustainable future – mission possible?’ The distinguished panel comprised of both internal and external speakers – Aaron Re’em,  Senior Account Director from TRUCOST, Dr. Nate Matthews from the Department of Geography and Prof. Mischa Dohler from the Department of Informatics at King’s. The panel tackled a wide range of questions ranging from the the need for a new definition for sustainability to the role of the private sector and governments. They shared examples of the need for critical change in several areas but it was most heartening to hear the positive examples they shared as well.  Here are three positive examples shared by the speakers

1. A compelling business case may be the missing link to a sustainable future

The Carbon War Room analysed several technologies which had the potential to advance the low-carbon economy on a big scale. They looked for specific reasons why such technology hadn’t been adopted yet in the most polluting sectors and found that in many cases, it was simply a matter of poor communication and the need to create a compelling business case. For instance, the shipping industry is known to be a very big polluter. The industry uses raw diesel and cities with ports are usually extraordinarily polluted.

Although the technology exists to reduce this problem, the missing link lay in lack of market information. The company has recently launched operation shipping efficiency which aims to reduce carbon emissions by bridging gaps in market information related to environmental efficiency, encouraging key stakeholders to embed efficiency into decision making, and unlocking capital flow for technology retrofits.  They found that through this there was potential for the shipping industry to save $70 Billion per year on fuel and reduce carbon and other pollutants by 30 percent.

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Try these delicious seasonal recipes for Green Week!

February 7, 2014 /

[GUEST BLOG] Selina is Departmental Administrator and Equality Representative for the Department of Pharmacy and the Department of Forensic & Analytical Science. She loves cooking and is working on her own cookbook. Try out her Green Week recipes below!

You may already have heard of Meatless Monday, the campaign to try to get all us of to reduce our reliance on meat by encouraging consumption of at least one vegetable based meal each week. In addition there is also the Love Food Hate Waste campaign to try to get us to think more sensibly about the food we buy to reduce the amount we needlessly throw away. Why not celebrate Green Week at King’s with a 5 day menu of cheap and nutritional meals based on seasonal vegetables, love your leftovers and do your bit to reduce food waste and help the environment?

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Join Green Week at King’s!

January 13, 2014 /

Green Week is an annual national week of action on climate change at universities across the UK. Held from 10 – 16 February 2014, the week is about raising awareness of sustainability issues and offers an opportunity for students and staff to take part in exiting events and explore ways they can make a difference.

The Sustainability team and KCLSU will organise activities and campaigns on energy, water, food, waste and transport across King’s campuses. We will also offer a peek into the world of sustainable careers, host free bike events and join in with national campaigns Meat-free Monday and the Student Switch Off.

Green Week is a great opportunity to get involved and help organise activities and campaigns at your campus. Whether you would like to showcase your society, present your work or host an event, we are happy to help and spread the word to King’s students and staff (have a look at the People & Planet website for some inspiration). You can also join the team on the day to help out as a Green Week Ambassador. Just get in touch with your event or activity ideas!

We look forward to seeing you there,

The Sustainability team

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Managing a household of 30,000+ people

December 18, 2013 /

Yesterday our team joined a London Universities Environmental Group (LUEG) meeting to talk about various ways to reduce our carbon emissions. LUEG meetings offer a great opportunity to share best practice with sustainability practitioners at other universities in London, as we all work on similar issues. One of those issues is energy use. With more than 25,000 students and 6,000 staff, the College spends about £10 million on energy per year! We listened to a presentation by DemandLogic, a company that works for King’s to identify energy efficiency problems in our estates by getting data from building management systems into ‘the cloud’. Or as Joe of DemandLogic described it, this is where the “hardcore industrial world meets internet geeks”.

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The DemandLogic system shows how the building management system is performing.

Controlling buildings better can save a lot of energy and reduce emissions. The Carbon Trust estimated that UK businesses and public bodies could reduce 2 million tonnes of CO2 emissions by encouraging more sustainable behaviours from employees, which could save a shocking £500 million! Since DemandLogic started to work with King’s a year ago we’ve saved 2500 tonnes of carbon. Overall it is estimated the project identified savings worth approximately £390,000.

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Sustainability Forum: Urban farms, food co-ops and crowdfunding

December 3, 2013 /

[GUEST BLOG]

Faazi is a geography student at King’s College London. She provides her thoughts below on our second Sustainability Forum on sustainable food production and social entrepreneurship. 

The GrowUp story

For our second forum we were lucky to have former King’s student Tom Webster come to talk to us about GrowUp, his sustainable urban farming business. Tom and his business partner Kate use vertical growing techniques and aquaponics to grow salad and vegetables and farm tilapia fish. Vertical growing means that food can be grown with much less space than traditional farming, which is ideal for cities – and also reduces transport emissions. The fish tanks are kept inside the greenhouses that the vegetables are in, so the heat from the tanks also heats the greenhouse. Aquaponics is a farming system where water is kept within a loop: the nutrient-rich water from the fish tanks is used to nourish the plants and is then recirculated to the tanks, so energy and water use are kept to an absolute minimum. Tom and Kate raised the initial costs of £16000 through a Kickstarter campaign, where anyone can donate to your project in return for a small gift once the project is up and running – proof that with a bit of work, anyone can take their ideas to the next level!

Brainstorm on sustainable food at King’s

As a group, we came up with loads of brilliant ideas to make food at King’s more sustainable. There isn’t a big range of healthy food sold in King’s Food outlets, and the labels don’t tell you how the food was produced and where it came from. Switching to sustainable, local suppliers who used seasonal food would reduce the carbon footprint of the food that we consume on campus. There is currently a farmer’s market every Tuesday on Guy’s Campus which sells local food, and it would be fantastic to have something similar on all five campuses.

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How can we make food at King’s more sustainable?

November 26, 2013 /
Photo by James Lee on Flickr.

Photo by James Lee on Flickr.

This month’s Sustainability Forum will focus on two themes: sustainable food and social entrepreneurship. We invited Kate Hofman and Tom Webster, founders of the GrowUp urban farm. They used crowd funding to raise more than £16.000 for their social business through a Kickstarter campaign and successfully built a prototype fish and salad farm in a shipping container box near London Bridge, showcasing new techniques for sustainable food production in the city.

Food sustainability at King’s

We hope their story will inspire many students and staff to start up their own food sustainability projects. Similarly, we would like to offer a platform for suggestions and ideas on the food we provide at King’s. This academic year all catering was moved in-house to King’s Food, which allows us to improve on different aspects that impact our ecological footprint. The sustainability team met with King’s Food to see if we can work towards the Soil Association Catering Mark, which is “an independent endorsement that food providers are taking steps to improve the food they serve, using fresh ingredients which are free from undesirable additives and GM, and better for animal welfare” (more info here). Accreditation schemes such as the catering mark are a way to analyse all aspects of food sustainability in our canteens: from choosing where supplies come from to what is on our menus. 

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Lisa Dupuy reports on King’s first Sustainability Forum

November 7, 2013 /

[GUEST BLOG]

Lisa is a master’s student in the War department at King’s, reading non-proliferation and international security studies. On her own blog she writes about journalism and conflict. She provides her thoughts below on King’s first Sustainability Forum.

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How would students want to make King’s more sustainable, if they were the Principal? It was the question asked of the participants of the Sustainability team’s first sustainability forum, which took place on 31 October. To help the students get a grasp on the challenges of creating a ‘green movement’ within King’s College, Felix Spira had been invited to give a talk on behalf of rootAbility. As a student, Spira was the founder of the Green Office at Maastricht University (the Netherlands), a student-led sustainability unit that became a viable and authoritative body within the university, employing students to work on sustainability projects.

Since leaving Maastricht, Spira has duplicated this model and now assists other universities to set up their own sustainability unit. Spira walked the students through the stages of this process, dealing with such issues as commitment, time management and access. His ‘message’ centred around the idea that, regardless of clever schemes and policy, the actual impact of sustainability projects relies on whether you can get people – students, professors, staff – involved and convinced.

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Join us at the first King’s Sustainability Forum

October 17, 2013 /

Welcome to our new blog. We’ll be keeping you informed and inspired about sustainability activities at King’s College and we’ll always be open to any guest blog offers from staff, students or alumni. Just get in contact with us.

In the meantime the first thing we wanted to do was get the word out and invite you to our new Sustainability Forum. The first meeting is aimed at students as we had a great response at the Freshers’ Fair but staff are more than welcome to attend and we’ll make sure that we cater more directly for staff over the year.

Meet the team, share your ideas and learn about opportunities to get involved! We will be joined by Felix Spira, entrepreneur at rootAbility, a social business focusing on sustainability in the higher education sector.

Felix Spira

Felix Spira- the man himself!

As a student he co-founded the successful Green Office at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. He will share his experiences and offer some inspiration and ideas on how to make an impact at university!

The Green Office set up and run by students at Maastricht university

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