On a personal level, sustainability is incredibly important to me. We have been given an opportunity to adjust our practice and habits so that the lives of our children and our children’s children are not compromised. I am now in a fortunate position where I can contribute towards ensuring we continue to develop in an ethical and forward-thinking way to contribute towards a lasting and positive legacy for College.
Mr Peplow
Head of Property Services
Property Services is a key department at College as we look to improve our sustainability credentials. Not only can Property Services improve the efficiency of our buildings, but we can work to manage our waste better, encourage change in behaviours and build in resilience for our buildings to ensure a more sustainable future for College. All these challenges are made so much easier working in an environment that embraces this approach and treats sustainability with the utmost importance. Having been a part of Sustainability Committee meetings, I know that this is the case!
Whilst considering alternative and renewable energy supplies is important (and we are doing this), our primary goal is to ensure that our buildings are operating at an optimum efficiency. This doesn’t just mean tapering our heating and cooling in buildings but upgrading single-glazed windows, insulating roofs and installing LED lighting throughout. We have started this journey in earnest, doing just that in in one of our buildings, Royal House, where we will measure the impact of these changes. We plan to take this approach across our estate, which comes with complexity given the age and status of many of our buildings. This will be a programme of works that may not be complete for ten or so years but, year-on-year, we will be able to demonstrate an improvement in the efficiency of our buildings as we work towards being Net Zero Carbon. To further demonstrate our intent, we have recently gained planning consent for a new purpose-built boarding house, designed to be net zero carbon in operation.
Outside of our buildings we have begun a programme of photo-voltaic (PV, or solar) installations and completed our first installation at the Health & Fitness Centre. We learnt a great deal from this installation and will take this learning into our plans to install more arrays on Main Site this summer. After this, it is conceivable that we work though our entire estate installing PV on every appropriate building. The same can be said for the installation of LED lighting – plans are in place for a full replacement programme on Main Site this summer and we then hope to roll this out to our boarding houses.
Property Services and the Sustainability Committee have worked together with an organisation called Acutro, to develop a dashboard that shows the amount of energy consumed in each boarding house. This will be on continuous display around College with the hope that each House compete to become the most efficient, bringing about, I am sure, positive behavioural change. We intend to extend this to better measure and report on food waste in each House too.
Whilst all the above gathers momentum, we have worked hard on rationalising our storage and managing better what we do with items that are surplus to College’s requirements. In sustainably recycling surplus items, we can demonstrate a £26,000 social impact contribution to the community, diverting 2.4 tonnes away from landfill and saving 7.2 tonnes of carbon.
Smaller things also have an impact – the Property Services fleet of cars have moved to be hybrid or electric and we are piloting the use of entirely recyclable floor tiles on a key summer project.
I can see momentum gathering across College as more and more students and staff begin to contribute towards making our wonderful estate a more sustainable place to study and work.
Listen to our recent podcast episode ‘Earth Day: Sustainability at CLC’ to hear more about the sustainability initiatives at College. Mr Richards (COO), Abigail and Penelope (SFC) share their passion for looking after our planet and what projects they’re working on to support College in being more sustainable.
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