Engagement and Activities

The Sustainability Team supports the yearly fresher fair with interactive workshops that promote and encourage sustainable living. In 2022, the Sustainability stand focused on the current energy and cost of living prices, and helped students to realise the small changes they can make in order to save money and energy. The team also showcased their 'Green Cooking' workshop, teaching both staff and students a greener way of cooking through the use of thermal equipment. The team used a heated thermal blanket to slow cook a vegetable chilli whilst using only 10 minutes of energy to heat the chilli through, before placing it in a thermal blanket to slow cook for 5 hours. This demonstrated that food can be cooked and served using minimal energy consumption.

We always encourage our students to put their design and practical minds at work to produce educational infographics to help showcase sustainable practices to fellow students, staff and visitors.  

In 2021, the Sustainability team worked with Business student to produce infographics for the 'Think Before Your Print' campaign that was shared to all staff to demonstrate the amount of carbon that is produced when printing. The campaign was a success and saw a significant reduction in day to day printing vs our baseline data that was set in March 2021. 

Our biodiversity students have played a significant role in the maintenance, upkeep and research of our green spaces dotted around campus. In 2021, we invited around 12 students to participate in Meadow Scything with tuition from a trained professional. The students were taught how to effectively perform maintenance on a Scythe and how to use them safely in order to trim down the Wildflower Meadow, situated near the Atrium campus. 

In September 2022, we invited our new International Students to assist with sowing seeds around the wildlife pond and clearing back the old flowers and plants from the summer bloom. This activity allowed students to get a feel of how biodiversity has shaped in an all-nature habitat and the students were keen to discuss biodiversity from their homes in India and Nigeria respectively! 

In November 2021, the UK hosted the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, bring world leaders together to tackle climate change. To build momentum for this pivotal event and running alongside a programme of Suffolk based additional activities, the University partnered with Suffolk County Council to invite students to take part in a competition with the goal for students to explore climate challenges and think about how the current issues of climate change were affecting them. 

The competition allowed students from all areas of the university to use their creative and figurative ways to demonstrate what climate change meant to them; whether that was through drawings, writing, crafting or photography. The panel of judges included the Vice Chancellor of the University Professor Helen Langton, Sustainability advisor and British Environmentalist - Tony Juniper CBE and Suffolk County Councillor Richard Rout.  

An impressive number of students took part in the competition and the winners received honorary rewards handed by Professor Helen Langton herself.

The University of Suffolk works with Cyclescheme to offer an affordable and greener way to travel. The scheme allows members of staff to purchase bicycle with equipment to help reduce the need to travel by car and to improve health and wellbeing.  

For more information about scheme and the services they offer, please visit the Cyclescheme website.

Your Car Benefit Scheme from Tusker is the smarter way to run a car. A fixed monthly amount is taken directly from your gross salary and in return, you get the use of a brand-new car – Tusker sort everything else out at no extra cost. Find out more about the scheme.