Celebrating sustainability within our departments

Throughout the academic year 38 teams across the university have been working hard to achieve either Bronze, Silver or Gold in the Sustainable Essex Awards.

The Sustainable Essex Award is an environmental accreditation internal programme run by the Sustainability Team. It brings staff and students in a department together in a team and provides them with a tangible framework to make their department more sustainable whether that is in the office or at home.

This year 14 teams achieved Bronze, 14 teams achieved Silver and 10 teams achieved Gold.

Bronze award

Digital Innovation Technology Services
Customer Services Estates team
Essex Sport
Evening team – Cleaning and Portering section
Event Essex
Faculty Office (Arts and Humanities)
Faculty office of Science and Health
Finance, Planning and Data Insight
Grey DS – Cleaning and Portering section
North Area 3 – Cleaning and Portering section
Orange team – Cleaning and Portering section
Outreach
Pink team – Cleaning and Portering section
People and Culture
School of Life Sciences
Soft FM Operations Assistant

Silver award

Caretaker team – Cleaning and Portering section
Communications External Relations
Derwent FM
Event Essex
Faculty of Social Sciences
Green team – Cleaning and Portering section
North area 1 – Cleaning and Portering section
North area 2 – Cleaning and Portering section
Outreach 
People and Culture
South area 1 – Cleaning and Portering section
South area 4 – Cleaning and Portering section
South courts A5 – Cleaning and Portering section
South courts Area 2 – Cleaning and Portering section
Sustainability-on-Sea
Yellow DS – Cleaning and Portering section

Showcasing our Gold award teams

• Essex Business School worked on maintaining their affiliation with the UN’s Principles in Responsible Management initiative (PRME) and seek out opportunities to participate in similar schemes.
• Edge Hotel School have started mapping the Sustainable Development Goals into their curriculum.
• Library and Cultural Services have put a plan into place to reduce single-use plastic and consider more sustainable options when procuring office supplies and freebies for students.
• Maintenance and Capital Development assisted with the implementation of a digital permit system across the Estates team. This is an initial roll out which will eventually be campus wide.
• Essex Start Ups set up a committee meeting for sustainability. They have decided on actions that we will undertake in the team to increase our awareness of sustainability and reduce our impact on the environment.
• Soft FM Services have sourced sustainable hand towels that can be flushed down the toilet and reduce blockages within North Towers, further reducing maintenance requests and rationalizing our product list to have one hand towel option throughout the university.
• The South courts Area 3 Cleaning and Portering team embedded 20 sustainable actions within the work that they do
• Student Development have incorporated environmental and sustainability factors into business decisions by making Sustainability a standing agenda item for Management Team meetings.
• Sustainability-on-Sea conducted a staff survey to help identify what individuals are already doing, celebrate achievements and where there is room for improvement.
• The UK Data Archive have implemented and maintained a range of additional recycling streams such as coffee pods, crisp packets and batteries.
• VC Office has written a blog about how their team has reduced its environmental impact see here.

If your department has changed the way they work to reduce their environmental impact please get in touch with us at, as we would love to hear about it.

How can you get involved?

As part of our Sustainability Sub Strategy we encourage all departments across the university to take part in Sustainable Essex. By the end of 2023 we want 100% achievement of the Sustainable Essex programme by all departments / sections. To get involved please email Sustainability@essex.ac.uk for more information.