Category: Staff (Page 9 of 11)

Guest Post: Franklin-Wilkins Library Sustainability Champions

August 2, 2016 /

[This week’s guest blog comes courtesy of Emily Russell, (Sustainability Champion for the Franklin-Wilkins Library). The views presented do not necessarily reflect those of King’s Sustainability]

[This is part of series of guest posts from Sustainability Champion teams, for more information about the scheme you can click here (Overview) and here (Summary of Awards evening).]

When I first heard about the sustainability workbook and audit my first thought was, ‘that sounds like a lot of work.’ The truth is we only had to make small changes to make our office more sustainable. To borrow a cliché, its small changes that can make a big difference. This June, I was proud to learn that those small changes earned the Franklin-Wilkins Library office a bronze in the annual sustainability awards.

As I ponder where to hang our lovely award, it’s also a great time to reflect on how we achieved it. While the sustainability workbook has its own headings, these are the three important messages I kept in mind when co-ordinating our workbook effort for bronze.

Educating

You cannot be sustainable all by yourself. Sustainability is a team effort, and you need the support of your colleagues. In order to educate my office about how they can be more sustainable, I use emails and posters. While completing the workbook this year we created a fun poster with a simple message about recycling. Using Star Wars characters (Yoda for recycle and Darth Maul for waste) we outlined to our colleagues about which bin they should use for specific waste. It helped to be specific about waste as not everyone is aware that you can’t recycle a crisp packet or that you can recycle a post-it note.

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Recycling

As well as creating fun posters to educate our colleagues, we started putting our scrap paper to good use. In the library we have lots of printers and we frequently find abandoned paper from when students or staff print incorrectly. Usually this paper would go in the bin, but we’ve started collecting non-confidential paper that is only printed on one side and made it available to students to use for note-taking. It’s proved popular with our students, and now we aren’t handing out fresh computer paper each time someone needs to take a few notes.

Powering off

While working on the sustainability workbook I found an infographic that said if you power down your PC at night you will save enough energy to heat six microwave dinners. That’s quite a bit of power, but again, this is an easy change you can put in to practice straightaway.

Completing our sustainability workbook was not a hard task to complete and I think it’s important that we role model sustainable behaviour to our students. The workbook has also motivated me to make sustainable changes in my personal life and again, I have started with small changes.

I’m looking forward to working on the silver workbook soon!

Bronze Award Winning Teams including the FWB team

Bronze Award Winning Teams including Jane Picciano and Samuel Clyma from Library Services

If you would like more information about the Sustainability Champions scheme or about general sustainability concerns at King’s you can contact the Sustainability Team. 

Celebrating at the Sustainability Champions Awards Evening (5th July 2016)

July 15, 2016 /

Tuesday 5th July saw the culmination of the Sustainability Champions scheme with the annual Sustainability Awards held at the Great Hall at Strand.

Over the last 12 months over 100 staff and students have been active Sustainability Champions with their actions affecting almost 2000 staff across the University. Taken together, the Champions have overseen the implementation of sustainable initiatives that have tangibly reduced the environmental impact of the University.

President and Principal, Professor Edward Byrne AC

President and Principal, Professor Edward Byrne AC discussing the importance of Sustainability

The evening opened with an opportunity for current and prospective Sustainability Champions from across the university to meet and share experiences.

After a short introduction from Kat Thorne, Head of Sustainability, the President and Principal, Professor Edward Byrne AC took the stage for a speech. The Principal emphasised the importance of University-wide sustainability, and thanked those who have made a difference improving practises in King’s. Jessica Naylor, from the NUS, followed this up by discussing the impact of the national Green Impact scheme for Sustainability Champions scheme across the country.

Kat Thorne, Head of Sustainability, introducing the awards

Kat Thorne, Head of Sustainability, introducing the awards

28 teams from across the University were then rewarded and thanked for their work over the past year and presented with their Bronze, Silver and Gold Awards with the winners listed below. .

The Silver winning Guy's Estates team

The Silver winning Guy’s Campus Operations and Hard Services Asset Management Team with Peter Frost admiring his Cactus

The Gold Winning Basic and Clinical Neuroscience Team

The Gold Winning Basic and Clinical Neuroscience Team

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The Bronze Winning Office Teams

The Bronze Winning Office Teams

The Bronze Winning Lab Teams

The Bronze Winning Lab Teams

It was great to see so many people from across the University community who have supported sustainability together in one place and to have the opportunity to thank them for their contributions.

There were many people who couldn’t attend the Awards ceremony but had been involved over the past year including many of our students who were involved as Auditors or supporting staff champions.

Karen Megranahan, a student who helped audit the Champions scheme, had this to say about the scheme:

‘It was a pleasure to be able to join Kings in celebrating those departments that have successfully participated in the green impact sustainability awards scheme. As an auditor it was wonderful to see so many people involved in the overall project really pulling together for the benefit of all. I hope that the successes to date will encourage more departments to participate in this valuable programme.’

We’d like to take this opportunity to once again say thank you to all the staff and students who have been involved over the past year and well done to all the Sustainability Champions for their achievements.

We look forward to working with everyone over the next year and presenting even more awards in a year’s time.

If you’re interested in participating in the Sustainability Champions scheme in the future please get in touch. There is more information available here, you can also sign up to our Champions mailing list. Next year’s scheme will be launch in October.

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All the winning teams, The Principal and Sustainability Staff

Charles Pegg, Sustainability Projects Assistant

A Look Back at the SRIRC and Changes Taking Place at King’s

June 9, 2016 /

Hello everyone,

First things first, my name is Tobias Udsholt and I will be working with the Sustainability Team at King’s over the next few months.

As a student at King’s I have spent a lot of time engaged on issues relating to asustainability. Now that I have completed my degree, I am very excited to spend the summer months putting words into action. I will only be with the team for a short period of time before I begin an MSc in Environmental Economics at LSE in September, but I hope to get a lot done. You can get in touch with me directly on tobias.1.udsholt@kcl.ac.uk.

One area of particular interest to me is the debate over the role and responsibilities of universities in relation to the array of societal challenges we collectively face. As I see it, universities stand uniquely placed to nurture an understanding of the importance of sustainability amongst its students while playing a positive and active role in the wider social debate.

Grass root campaigns calling for divestment from fossil fuel companies have sparked intense debate on university campuses over the past few years. How far should universities go in taking a stance on issues such as climate change? Can engagement with companies whose business-models centre on the extraction of fossil fuels help shift us towards a more sustainable trajectory? And how should strategical objectives be balanced with ethical dilemmas?

King’s responded to the Fossil Free KCL campaign in November 2015, by setting up the Socially Responsible Investment Review Committee (SRIRC) and tasking it with a wide-ranging review of practices. On the same occasion Professor Ed Byrne, the Principal of King’s, released a statement reiterating “the commitment of King’s College London to doing more to bring about a low carbon and just world.”

The review conducted at King’s is distinct from the approach taken by many other universities in the UK. Rather than focusing solely on the framework for making investment decisions, the scope of the SRIRC extends to in-house energy management, research grants and contracts, fundraising, procurement and of course investments. By formulating a new university-wide strategy for incorporating ethical considerations into daily-operations, sustainability is put on the agenda across the board. This presents a good opportunity for the Sustainability Team to feed in ideas for new sustainable procedures in a variety of areas. If you want to participate in this process you can either send your recommendations directly to ian.creagh@kcl.ac.uk or via us at sustainability@kcl.ac.uk.

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On Wednesday, the SRIRC held its second Open Forum to discuss the draft recommendations issued by the committee. I invite you all to browse through the discussion points but among the highlights are the following:

  • King’s plans to identify high quality managers that specialise in investments in solutions to climate change and other environmentally friendly issues.
  • King’s is currently working to create more incentives for academics to disclose consulting engagements.
  • There is spectrum for closer supervision of the supply-chains of contractors employed by King’s.
  • Policy is in place to reject prospective funding from organisations that are deemed harmful.

The discussion paper also revealed that King’s has been an important player in the establishment of a new tobacco-free fund at BlackRock Investments. This illustrates that there are a number of options available to secondary investors that do not directly control the destination of their investment.

The Open Forum itself was lively and well-attended. The panel-speakers included two student representatives, Dr. Tytus Murphy and Nadine Almanasfi, the Student Union President, as well as Ian Creagh, Head of Administration and College Secretary, Chris Mottershead, Vice-Principal (Research & Innovation) and Professor Sridhar Venkatapuram. In the ensuing question-and-answer session students probed the criteria set out to identify opportunities for positive investment and how the governance structure of the committee will be formalised going forward.

The SRIRC will make their final recommendations to the Principal by October.

Next week is Bike Week at King’s so expect a foray of information on cycling facilities, safety and initiatives at King’s.

Until next time!

Tobias Udsholt, Sustainability Projects Assistant

Socially Responsible Investment Review Committee Forum

June 6, 2016 /

Hi All

Jusocialst a quick reminder that we have the next Socially Responsible Investment Review Committee Forum tomorrow evening from 5pm to 7pm. It will be at S-2.08 at the Strand campus and will be an opportunity to hear what is happening in the world of King’s investment policy which involves ethical and sustainability issues such as fossil fuel companies. This is also a chance to have your voice heard on the topic.

More details can be found here.

Have a good week!

KCL Sustainability Veolia Trip

May 10, 2016 /
Group photo

Jessie Hardcastle, Jo Cassidy, Charles Pegg, Harry Warner, Beth Fuller, Richard Burgess

This Monday a group of King’s College Staff visited Veolia, our waste contractor who services all of Southwark. We got to see the processes our recyclables and general waste all go through (about 20,000KG each week) as well as all the sustainability work Veolia does.

Landfill Waste

If all the recyclables and general waste Veolia received went to landfill that would be the equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of CO2 each year but one of their main accomplishments is their lack of landfill waste. All general waste they receive are transferred to the SELCHPs (South-East London Combined Heat and Power) incinerator and produce heat and power (saving up to 8,000 tonnes of CO2 each year). Similarly other waste this yields has been used to produce steel and limestone to fill mine shafts.

Biodiversity Projects

To support local biodiversity Veolia has several schemes for wildlife. Birds, bats and beetles are all accommodated for with roosting boxes while on the flora end over 100 trees and 10,000 shrubs have been planted. Serum mats also provide an artificial, green roof habitat over the building’s rooftop.

Building Sustainability

The Southwark Integrated Waste Management Facility was built with sustainability in mind. 25% of the materials in its construction came were from recycled sources and its rooftop solar panels provide 20% of the buildings energy requirements. Meanwhile grey water is used for car washing and toilets in the resource centre while smart taps limit any fresh water use.

Education

The Veolia plant also does plenty to educate local members of community. They hold regular site tours to those interested but they put notable effort in appealing to primary schools to engage with young children about the importance of recycling properly.

While we can always improve our waste management systems (only a third of what Veolia receives is put in recycling bins) it is good to see our partners at Veolia attempting to improve the sustainability on their end.

 

 

Charles Pegg, Sustainability Projects Assistant
veolialogo

KCL Green Impact Office Audits

April 5, 2016 /

March 31st saw this year’s Sustainability Champions good work be audited by a selection of volunteering students.

What are the Sustainability Champions?

Sustainability Champions are our members of staff promoting sustainable use of their environment for the Green Impact Scheme accreditation.

What is Green Impact?

Green Impact is an NUS lead scheme working with hundreds of organisations to improve workplace sustainability and public engagement. Each team of Sustainability Champions (organised by department) use different criteria from a workbook to go for Gold, Silver or Bronze Awards depending on their achievements.

This was just Green Impacts second year at King’s and we had about 20 office teams across our campuses, and a similar amount of lab teams.

AuditingAudit Team

8 Teams submitted their workbooks (with teams aiming for awards between bronze and gold) on the 25th of March and 8 students volunteered to help audit their work last Thursday. From 9.30am to 1pm our auditors were trained by Jessica Naylor from the NUS with help from their laptops (to keep their work paper-less) before being sent off in teams of two to audit our sustainability champion groups. These were between all campuses from the Strand, to Guy’s to Denmark Hill.

All our auditors did an amazing job and so did our sustainability champions. Small issues are being rectified over the next few weeks but we’re super proud of how it went.

The Green Impact awards will be on 5th of July where our teams will receive their awards and celebrate their achievements.

If you’d like to know more about Sustainability Champions you can find information here.

Charles Pegg, Sustainability Projects Assistant

Sustainability Champions- Culture at King’s

August 17, 2015 /

This weeks guest blog comes courtesy of Culture at Kings, who tell us about some of the great initiatives they have been carrying out over the last few months as well as their upcoming sustainability plans.

“If you know where to look, you can find many great green initiatives at King’s. There’s an Urban Garden Project, a Cycling Club and there’s even talk of having a bee hive on the roof of the Strand building. It’s fantastic to see how many people across the University are concerned with the environment and we at Culture at King’s wanted to be a part of that of course, so we signed up to the Sustainability Champions scheme with a team of six.

We worked through our workbook and ticked the boxes for a greener office: printing double-sided, wearing jumpers instead of turning up the heating, drinking Fairtrade tea, and shutting down equipment that’s not in use. But soon we started to change things in our personal routines as well. We realised we were eating less meat, we wouldn’t buy products with excessive wrapping, at least two of us have a 4-minute-shower-challenge timer, and we started bringing spare fruit and veg into the office to share with colleagues to reduce our food waste.

Plant-cultureStella Toonen signed up to receiving a bagful of organic vegetables every week, an initiative run by PhD student Roger Hallam in the CMCI department to offer an alternative to buying groceries from supermarkets. Yvonne Castle attended a Bee Hotel Workshop led by Urban Bees, a free event which was part of the Northbank Festival. She made a little bamboo hotel for solitary bees and learnt lots about the different types of bees pollinating London flora. And Kate Dunton helped out at her local organic community allotment and planted bee-friendly flowering herbs in her own garden.

So with all the support we received from colleagues we decided we could take it a bit further and started organising bigger awareness initiatives. We set up an ‘Air Con Free Fridays’ pilot in the office for July and August, which is going very well. And we’re planning to organise a ‘Buy British Week’, in which we encourage staff to buy products grown close to home and celebrate their achievements with a picnic on the last day of the week.

Staff enjoying the breeze at our first Air Con Free Friday

Staff enjoying the breeze at our first Air Con Free Friday

It looks like we’ve got exciting ‘green’ things coming up, and (perhaps subconsciously) our work across King’s also seems to include some great initiatives too. Our Science Gallery London team at Guy’s campus has been promoting the benefits of eating insects through our Fed Up season about food, and as part of our Cultural Institute’s Utopia 2016 season we’re already having great conversations with artists about visualising a perfectly sustainable world. As Sustainability Champions we’d like to think we had something to do with it.”

Green Impact Audit Training

August 12, 2015 /

Last week we held training for students and staff to become Green Impact Auditors as part of the NUS Green Impact scheme, gaining practical experience of auditing through the IEMA approved scheme.

With 27 teams currently working towards their Green Impact award as part of the Sustainability Champions scheme at King’s, there has been some great changes across the university already!

The morning involved a training session, with a quick introduction into environmental auditing, as well as a discussion into what sustainability meant to each of us. The variety of responses to this, Fairtrade produce, longevity, recycling, compassion, showed the true variety of things that sustainability encompasses across King’s.

The team of auditors last Thursday!

The team of auditors last Thursday!

After discussions, ice breakers and lunch, we began to prepare for an afternoon of audits. This involved taking a positive approach to all communications, while looking for evidence to support team’s environmental actions. Each of the auditors were given the chance to get involved with hands-on training and learn about the small changes that can be made to create a more sustainable environment across King’s.

With the Sustainability Champions Awards Evening taking place on the 22nd September it will be a great chance to see the results from last week’s audits and reward the teams for the efforts they have made in the last few months!

The Sustainability Champions scheme provides the opportunity for everyone to get more involved with sustainability across King’s. We are hoping to continue to expand this sustainable network across King’s in the next academic year, so if this seems like something you and your department may be interested in, get involved by filling out an application form.

For any further details of how you can get involved with sustainability at King’s in general, contact the Sustainability team at sustainability@kcl.ac.uk or sign up to our newsletter.

Rhianne Menzies, Sustainability Projects Assistant

Swap Shop with F&SD champions!

July 27, 2015 /

On 13 May 2015, we held the first ever Fundraising & Supporter Development swap shop to encourage sustainable behaviour change across our team of 113 staff members. It was held in Virginia Woolf Building on Kingsway, lasted for two hours and more than 50 people attended.

The swap shop raised £107 toward the King’s Helipad Appeal, donated 120 items to Oxfam and 30 items to the homeless shelter in St Martin’s In the Fields.

We also had some regular and some Fairtrade home-baked goods to accompany the swapping, and people could donate what they thought their items were worth. Things baked included Fairtrade sponge cake, flapjacks, banana bread and Guinness cake, all of which went down a treat.

There was also music and this turned the event into a bit of a social for our team. We also gave away free Fairtrade tea samples, and also sustainably-produced Green Reggie branded canvas bags, in which people could carry away their booty.

Some people were incredibly generous and donated literally dozens of items, and we also had many clothes given to us by popular fashion label Warehouse, as they are one of our charity supporters. image2Overall, we had a mixture of men and women’s clothes, accessories, shoes, books and homeware items.

The swap shop helped to raise the profile of the F&SD sustainability team, build awareness of our activities and encouraged other team members to get involved. Colleagues straightaway insisted we hold another one, and we currently have plans to host one again after August, once the other half of our team joins us from across the bridge in JCMB.

Please contact Catherine.heath@kcl.ac.uk if you would like any more information about the swap shop.

King’s Sustainable Lab Awards

July 17, 2015 /

Last week the Sustainability team hosted the first ever KCL Lab Sustainability Awards. These awards are a part of the NUS Green Impact awards with a focus on research laboratories, and utilise the S-Lab environmental assessment framework to evaluate labs for their efficiency and sustainability. 10 teams participated in the awards; the most teams in England. 8 won bronze and the other 2 teams commendably won silver, as the long-term goals are for incremental effective improvements which are user driven.

A host of positive actions were taken as a part of these awards. Martin Farley, (Research Efficiency Officer and lab-awards manager) spoke of some tissue culture labs at FWB managed by Beatriz Padilla (PhD candidate). Their ULT freezer was almost full and they were either about buy a new freezer or out source for space. Instead they decided to defrost there ULT freezer as a part of the awards. They managed to create ~40-50% more space, audited the samples they had, and put less strain on the freezers compressor by cleaning the dirty filter. Not only did they avoid purchase and running costs of a new ULT freezer, they saved on the one they owned.

Worth mentioning are the two silver teams: Dr. Bernard Freeman (Lab Manager) and Sandhya Anantharaman (Research Technician) helped SGDP achieve a silver award with their in-house designed online lab management tools. Women’s Health also commendably achieved silver through their note-worthy engagement and shared plans to re-engage with the awards next year. Dr. Pamela Taylor-Harris of the Women’s Health Team (also including Cally Gill and Rima Patel) stated “Women’s Health were definitely inspired by lab sustainability and I’m sure would like to take part again and continue to improve practice in the future.”.

Next year the aim is to grow the number of teams participating, and aid the repeating teams to achieve new and improved goals in an aim to bring all labs to a Gold standard. Look to our website for more details and updates about what is going on, or contact Martin Farley or the sustainability team at sustainability@kcl.ac.uk.

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