In 2022, the Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) Store won a Changemaker Award for supporting students and staff to access reusable, recyclable and sustainable materials to use in their projects, courses and workshops. Erin Colquhoun, Assistant Technician at the Materials Hub, gives an update one year on. The past year: high demand from students Over the past year, the ECA Store has merged together with the Reuse hub. We are now called The Materials Hub. This merger brings together the recycling and reuse of materials with buying art materials. We encourage the reuse of materials to create art, giv ..read more

In 2018, María Isabel Amorín Cabrera founded her company CrustaTec, that uses shrimp shell waste for wastewater treatment. The company has won many awards already and has not stopped developing. We spoke with her about her inventions, her travels around the world and how biorefinery gives her hope for a sustainable future. For International Women’s Day, MSc Science Communication placement students want to spotlight some of the women that are part of the Climate 75, the list of University of Edinburgh alumni who are making a difference in sustainability and climate change. Using shrimp shells t ..read more

Covid-19 has not only been a healthcare crisis, but has also exacerbated existing tensions in our food systems. Meg McGrath, a Communications Coordinator at the Department for Social Responsibility and Sustainability, discusses the impacts of Covid-19 on our food system and her experience of supporting local efforts to redistribute food to ensure no one goes hungry.  One thing that has woven together many of our lockdown experiences is food. Whether you baked sourdough, banana bread or made whipped coffees, all of which took social media b ..read more

Hybrid working is part of the effort to reduce the spread of Covid-19, meaning time is split between on campus and home working. Read on to find out how to build sustainability into your working day, wherever you’re working from. This includes: how to save energy, carbon and money at home; updated incentives to make it easier to cycle to work; ongoing funding support for eco-equipment; and the latest information on how to correctly dispose of Covid-19 related waste on campus. These tips come from staff at the Department for Social Responsibility and Sustainability and the Estates Department. T ..read more

Student MedAID is a student-led society and charity based here at the University of Edinburgh, making headlines in recent months due to our work in increasing sustainability in medicine and decreasing healthcare inequalities worldwide. Find out more in this blog from the fourth year Medical students, Nur Shazlin Shek Daud, the Vice-President and Alba Saenz de Villaverde, the President of the society. As an organisation, we hope to encourage further thinking and research into potential opportunities to reduce the medical waste footprint, by facilitating the progress of the healthcare sector tow ..read more

Edinburgh Alumna Pauline Op de Beeck was recognised as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 in Retail and Ecommerce for her work in driving the fashion industry to be more sustainable. We chatted to her about her top tips on how you can influence the industry, her favourite material innovation and what she thinks the future of fashion will look like. What is your role at the Carbon Trust? I’m a Client Manager and the Sustainable Fashion Lead at the Carbon Trust, which means I manage the company’s work with fashion, retail and manufacturing sectors across the UK and Europe. I help them ide ..read more

Working or studying at home? Now is a great time to show both yourself and the planet some love. Read our top tips for boosting your wellbeing while reducing your environmental impacts. By Meg McGrath, Communications Coordinator in the Department for Social Responsibility and Sustainability at the University of Edinburgh Spending all day at home can be tough. Tougher still if you have work deadlines to meet, exams to prepare for, and perhaps even children or elderly relatives to care for. It’s a stressful time for many. Yet this time at home can bring a welcome break from tiresome routine ..read more

With plastic being a hot topic in the news, the Printing Services team attempted to find an eco-friendly alternative to plastic binders covers for their 2019 Gold Award. The Printing Services team have always been advocates of sustainability whilst still providing a cost-effective service to University departments, students and external customers. After coming up with a list of items they used that contained plastic, the team had a conversation about how they could reduce plastic use in their homes lives and also use more sustainable materials at work. They identified that a large proport ..read more

For their 2019 gold project, the Centre for Open Learning worked to collect, recycle and redistribute stationery from the University to reduce waste and help share resources with the local community. One of the stationery collection boxes. Since November 2018, the Centre for Open Learning have been leading a stationery recycling collection scheme accepting a range of pens, folders and erasers before either recycling or donating them to a local school. Saving waste and sharing This scheme was done through Terracycle’s initiative sponsored by Bic. Students and staff from the Holyrood camp ..read more

Liquid helium is excellent at cooling superconducting electromagnets, but easily evaporates and escapes from equipment due to being the second smallest element. With global supplies of this non-renewable resource becoming scarce, the School of Chemistry used the Sustainable Campus Fund to invest in a novel solution to trap and collect escaping helium so it can be used again. This blog post was first published in 2019 as a Sustainable Campus Fund case study on the Department for Social Responsibility and Sustainability website. The importance of helium Helium – the second lightest element – is ..read more