The university supports the Scottish Government’s target to reduce waste and increase recycling by 2025 and has made significant progress in waste management.
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Sustainability at RGU
Our Journey to Net Zero
Working in collaboration with students and staff, RGU aims to significantly reduce emissions from energy, transport and consumables, while factoring recycling and building sustainability into all our future decisions.
We are implementing a policy across the University to be more sustainable across our campus by reducing waste, energy and water consumption.
To date, the University has invested more than £5 million to support our carbon reduction initiatives. This includes the installation of LED lighting across our estate, solar panels and the new, more energy-efficient gas boilers in Gray’s and RGU Sport.
Operationally, the University is developing a fabric first approach to ensure the energy efficiency and sustainability of all our buildings and campus operations.
The University has waterless urinals, which are helping save more than one million litres of water a year and sales of ONE water in our cafeterias, where part of the sale goes to fund wells in Africa, have led to RGU supporting two wells. The Sir Ian Wood Building has a ground source heat pump which is working to supply heating around the building. Our estates team use electric grounds equipment with a view to moving reducing a reliance on petrol powered apparatus completely.
One of RGU's key priorities is to reduce the overall environmental footprint through carefully targeted actions, interventions and choices. These include:
- Use 100% green electricity across the campus
- Identify options to decarbonize RGU heat demand
- Reduce water consumption
- Increase focus on carbon footprint in each of our contracts
Our employees, students and guests are provided with consumption data for the buildings they use in order for them to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in compliance with the Climate Change (Scotland) Act.
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We are actively encouraging sustainable behaviour in our community, such as the uptake of carbon-reducing travel schemes, including cycling and the provision of electric vehicles.
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In the period 2015-17, the University reduced its carbon footprint by 27%, the highest reduction in absolute emissions achieved by any Scottish university.
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Our annual sustainability report captures the work going on across the University to highlight how it is actively reducing its emissions to achieve net zero by 2045.
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