• LSE awarded a First by People & Planet

The School has been awarded a First for its environmental performance in this year's People & Planet Green League. LSE placed 22 out of the 142 institutions ranked.

• Reuse 2011
End of Term Reuse is now in place in all LSE halls of residence so if you have unwanted items that could be reused, it really is as easy as dropping them off at your hall reception

• Emeline Sztrakos
Emeline, LSE's carbon reduction manager, carbon offsets her air travel when possible, and would like to help the School become one of the 'greenest' universities in the country.

• LSE moves forward with its Carbon Management Plan

The Carbon Management Plan is progressing towards its implementation stage, with the Finance Committee approving a provisional budget of £1.3 million for the first year on 16 June 2011.

Forthcoming projects will range from improvements to lighting to reduce energy use, the installation of photovoltaic panels and improvements to heating systems. This covers all our buildings, including academic and residential, and will start to be installed over the next year. Please check future issues of Green News for details on how the School is progressing.
 

• Going for gold: an EcoCampus update 

• Green Impact 

Well done to all the teams that took part in Green Impact this year - you were part of something really big! Nationally, 35 universities and colleges participated this year, comprising 621 teams or departments. These contained 35,467 staff, of which 3,985 were directly involved in a Green Impact committee. In total, 19,620 greening actions were taken.

As a result of the scheme at LSE a total of 1,668 positive environmental actions were completed with the help of the 962 staff in the 31 departments taking part. This is a really great achievement by all 140 Green Impact team members. Thank you!

• It's time to bin that bin

A campus waste audit in June 2010 found that an average of 68 per cent of materials sent to landfill could be recycled and 13 per cent could be composted, leaving only 15 per cent of actual non-recyclable waste and 4 per cent of liquids.

• Waste Watchers 

A comprehensive waste audit of Lionel Robbins building took place in April 2011. Samples of waste were collected and labelled from the new Communal Recycling Stations in 14 areas to establish the levels of contamination in recycling streams and levels of potential recyclable materials placed in general waste streams. Staff areas demonstrated high sorting performances in comparison with student areas.

Staff received a short briefing session and opportunity to ask questions from the Sustainability Team, which must have served as an advantage over students. Particular congratulations going to the Centre of Economic Performance, who achieved an amazing 98 per cent of items placed in the correct bin. The Archives division at 72 per cent still performed well but there is clearly room for improvement and we ask all staff to help each other remember the correct sorting of waste and to pay attention to the labels on the bins. If in doubt, contact the Sustainability Team. Student areas on the lower ground, ground and fourth floor had the lowest performance at 67 per cent.

Staff and students are invited to sent their ideas on how to best target and educate students on the Communal Recycling Stations to the Sustainability Team. Best entries will be recognised on the Sustainable LSE Zero Waste website and will be drawn to win one of four home worm composting units.

The results of the audit, from best to worst sorting of waste in the new Communal Recycling Stations, are as follows

• Centre for Economic Performance, staff area, 98 per cent

• Information services, staff area, 95 per cent

• Financial Markets, staff area, 89 per cent

• Library administration office and IT, staff area, 87 per cent

• User services, staff area, 87 per cent

• Technical services, staff area, 85 per cent

• CIO, M25, staff area, 84 per cent

• STICERD, staff area, 74 per cent

• Second floor, student area, 73 per cent

• Archives, staff area, 72 per cent

• Third floor, student area, 70 per cent

• Lower ground floor, student area, 67 per cent

• Ground floor, student area, 67 per cent

• Fourth floor, student area, 67 per cent.

The audit also enabled us to get a better understanding of the type of waste that gets produced across the Library and helped us outline Communal Recycling Station requirements to both student and staff areas. You can win a wormery if you can help us think of the best way to offer information to students to help them increase correct use of the new Communal Recycling Stations (see below).
 

• Competition to win a wormery

No more food waste - just great garden fertiliser for free. Staff and students are invited to send their ideas on how to best to target and educate students on the Communal Recycling Stations to the Sustainability Team. Best entries will be recognised on the Sustainable LSE Zero Waste website and run the chance to win one of four home vemi composting garden units.

Send suggestions to Victoria Hands at v.e.hands@lse.ac.uk
 

• LSE retains First class honours for People & Planet Green League

LSE has been awarded a First for its commitment to systemic environmental management and its environmental performance in the 2011 People & Planet Green League.

This is the third year that the School has achieved a First in the Green League, placing 22nd out of the 142 institutions ranked in this year’s table.

The Green League is People & Planet's award winning environmental ranking of the UK's universities. Universities are ranked according to 13 environmental policy and performance-related criteria, in areas such as carbon reduction, waste recycling, energy efficiency, transport emissions and staff and student engagement.

• Gardeners' World 

The Annual Fund has awarded nearly £5k to formalise the rooftop food growing on campus. This will involve the establishment of permanent planters following a pilot year using builders bags of compost to grow lovely vegetables, salads and herbs.

At the same time, Capital Growth, who funded the original roof top food growing project, has announced that LSE is the winner of the Universities and Colleges category of the AB Seeds Competition. Well done to all Capital Growers who have maintained the sites and fed back their stories to the award application. The prize takes the form of a range of very useful equipment for the LSE gardeners to use on site.

Part of the prize includes a taster day at Fifteen, Jamie Oliver's restaurant. This involves being on the team in the kitchen and working alongside Lucien Green, the training and development chef. LSE Catering staff will feed back their experiences in the next Green News.
 

• What the experts are saying...

LSE staff are often asked to comment on the issues of today in the media. To keep up to date with what staff at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment have been saying, see their media articles web page.

• Keeping up with the LSEasyriders

A number of staff and students have signed up to the LSEasyriders team, which is taking part in the London Cycle Challenge 2011. The team has been logging miles cycled since Saturday 18 June and will be carrying on until Friday 15 July.

Helen Craig, greener living assistant in the Sustainability Team and one of the LSEasyriders, is only a recent convert to cycling and has written about her experiences of cycling in London - and the positive power of peer pressure - for the Sustainability website.

"My colleague Chantal had not stopped talking about how brilliant cycling is and how I should definitely cycle to work, since the day I started LSE in September" she writes. "I saw two immediate problems with this: firstly I didn't own a bike and secondly I live 12 mile always and didn't really fancy becoming known as the office sweat monster! I also just didn't see myself as the type of person who was a cyclist.

"Chantal is a very persistent person and came up with two (very annoying) solutions to my bicycle problems. She gave me her old bike, complete with essential gel seat cover, and sent me a link to LSE campus map, showing where all the showers and bike storage areas were. She left me no option but to give in to her nagging!" Find out how Helen got on here.

• Reuse 2011

End of Term Reuse is now in place in all LSE halls of residence so if you have unwanted items that could be reused, it really is as easy as dropping them off at your hall reuse room. If you can sort into appropriate boxes and ensure any sharps are left in the sharps box then this will help with the reuse of items enormously.

Every student in halls generates between 10 to 20kg of reusable items per year, including stationery, kitchen appliances, books, clothes and bedding. Often these things are thrown away at the end of term although many are in good condition and LSE aims to divert these reusable items from landfill by collecting them at the end of term so that they can be reused by local community organisations or stored and sold back at low cost to new students.

LSE students have donated over 25 tonnes of items to the Reuse Scheme since 2008, saving about 170 CO2e and the success of our end of term reuse schemes has inspired other universities to set up the same!

A three minute film on the scheme featuring Professor Lord Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, can be viewed here.

• Sustainability induction

The Flying Start Induction day is a great way to introduce new starters to life at LSE, including sustainability. Newcomers are given an introduction to the green goings on at LSE and how they themselves can get involved.

For more information on the course, how to sign up or how to send your employees on the course, please click here.

• Get SMART with an LSE Smart mug

If you regularly purchase drinks on campus and would like to save some money then why not purchase an LSE smart mug?

Smart mugs can be purchased from SU shops, the Quad Café and LSE catering outlets and LSE SU catering outlets are offering a 10p discount off hot drinks every time one is used. Mugs are spill proof and insulated to keep your drink hot and your hands cool without requiring a handle. They are 100 per cent Bisphenal A (BPA)-free and supported by a three-year defect guarantee.  

• Give an 'Owl' an Eco Home!

The Sustainability Team have five 'Owl' electricity monitors looking for temporary nesting homes for eight weeks. The 'Owl' will keep its beady eye on your electricity usage in real time. We want to hear about your experiences looking after your own 'Owl' and whether your non-feathered friend encouraged you to turn those lights off, leave less on standby and only use your hair straightener for a Friday night out! Full 'Owl' training and support will be provided for the first team of five people to contact Dan Reeves at d.reeves@lse.ac.uk

Dan Reeves is on the HR Sustainability Working Group and has been part of the Green Impact HR team over the last two years, training as a Green Impact auditor. He shares his experience of using energy monitoring at home:

"Using my own ElectriSave meter was enlightening. I expected that boiling a kettle for the essential tea would send the electricity soaring, and this was indeed the case! Things got more 'interesting' when the electric cooker or grill was on at the same time as boiling the kettle; this gave me an idea of 'peak power' usage. Having determined how much of energy I could use without really thinking about it, I started to change not only my behaviour, but also some of the 'energy monsters' lurking in my home. I now part fill the kettle so it boils quicker, we switch lights off when leaving a room, the microwave gets more of a work out than the electric cooker, and the smaller of the two ovens gets used first.

"Hall lighting was on a lot, and was 120W worth of conventional bulbs so these have been halved to 60W of down lighters. Front room lighting was 180W constant lighting and has been replaced with 60W of dimmable Varilight low energy bulbs. The monitor pointed us towards our bathroom as an energy guzzler. It looks 'pretty' being lit with 200W of shimmering halogen down lighters, but is now playing host to a singular LED bulb. LED uses a fifth of the electricity, but also offers three times the life of a conventional glitzy halogen - so win now and in the future.

"The ElectriSave meter is now very much part of the home and compliments the gas, standard electricity and water meters. Its advantage is that it offers clear and instantaneous feedback, to give information so I can choose to use energy wisely - and in the process save a bit on my bills. The payback is not only your 'green halo' but also in your wallet when the bill hits the doormat! I would thoroughly recommend having your own energy monitor, it will change the way you operate your home."
 

• On your bike

Want to cycle in to School but don't have a bike? Barclays Cycle Hire bikes can be borrowed from a number of docking stations near campus, including on Houghton Street. Bikes can be rented from the following places: 

• Houghton Street, Strand
• Portugal St, Holborn
• Kingsway, Covent Garden
• Sardinia Street, Holborn
• Carey St, Holborn
• Strand
• Milford Lane, Temple
• Wellington Street, Strand
• Tavistock Street, Covent Garden

Barclays Cycle Hire is open to everyone. People can sign up as members or just use their credit or debit card at the docking station terminal to access a bike as a casual user. Once you have gained access as a member or casual user, you insert your key or code and you can take a bike, ride it wherever you like and then return it ready for the next person to use.

It is a self service system which is available 24 hours a day throughout the year. Costs are the same whether you are a Member or not. Access fee starts from £1 a day and the first 30 minutes of any journey is free. Bikes can only be returned to docking stations. For more on the cycle hire scheme see http://www.tfl.gov.uk/roadusers/cycling/14808.aspx 
 

• Sustainability photo

The LSE Sustainability Team has got a new Flickr page to showcase sustainability around the School. You can currently find photos of the LSE Celebration of Sustainability 2011 but the team would like to add more, so if you have any photos showing how green LSE is, then send them to v.e.hands@lse.ac.uk to be uploaded.

To view the photos currently online, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/sustainablelse

• LSE academic to exhibit at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition

Dr David Stainforth of LSE's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Centre for the Analysis of Time Series is leading the preparation of an exhibit at this year's Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, which runs from 5-10 July.

The exhibit is entitled 'Confidence from Uncertainty: interpreting climate predictions' and aims to explore how we make and communicate predictions, how and when we can deduce probabilities, and the role of computer models in these processes. It will focus on climate change where basic physics is enough to highlight the severity of the problem but forecasting the details is one of today’s grand scientific challenges.

The exhibit will be brought to life via a combination of interactive computer based probability games and hands on physical games. The team hopes to then develop the exhibit into an ongoing interactive website, encouraging people to engage with the characteristics of different forms of confidence and uncertainty in relation to climate science.

• Sustainability in Practice lectures

All recent Sustainability in Practice lectures are now available online as podcasts so if you missed any of the inspirational speakers who have shown themselves to be experts in delivering sustainability, their talks can be downloaded from here

Recent events include:

• Tim Macartney, founder and CEO of Embercombe, who spoke on Next-generation Leadership and Management;

• Polly Higgins, barrister, author and international environmental lawyer, who gave a lecture entitled Eradicating Ecocide: laws and governance to prevent the destruction of our planet; and

• BBC Breakfast presenter Bill Turnbull who spoke on How Not to Keep Bees.

If you would like a particular speaker to deliver a talk as part of the Sustainability in Practice series, please let the Sustainability Team know.

• LSE orchards take shape

Rosebery and Passfield Halls have become the first halls of residence to plant orchards, with 25 fruit trees now at Rosebery Hall and five at Passfield.

Over 15 Rosebery Hall residents and local Islington community members participated in the planting ceremony at Rosebery Hall on 20 March. Participants enjoyed a delicious continental brunch before getting to work, planting the 25 fruit trees that make up the Rosebery orchard. A green roof is also being established at the hall.

Five trees have also recently been planted by students and staff at Passfield Hall, within sight of the LSE roof-top beehives.