Third year Geography, Environmental Science, and Bioscience students on a ‘Climate Change and Society’ module have turned heads with a sustainability initiative aimed at tackling the issues of single-use plastic and waste.
Penryn-based students under Catherine Leyshon, Associate Professor of Human Geography, are getting people to think about their shampoo usage, food packaging, food waste, clothing, and single-use plastic bottles. As part of the module, each set of students formed a lobby group and made their campaign presence known on the Exeter Penryn Campus through public displays.
Professor Leyshon said of the groups, who were trying to persuade fellow students to make small positive changes, “I’m extremely proud of how well they’ve been able to filter the high level COP23 UN Climate Change conference outcomes into simple every day actions that anyone can make, which cumulatively can make a big difference”. Aside from the campus-centred campaign, Leyshon’s students also entered into the local community around Penryn with a ‘Climate Conversations’ group. With this, the group have been raising awareness among local businesses of environmentally sustainable business practises.
Here in Streatham, the Students’ Guild has been pushing for sustainability changes of its own. The 2017/18 academic year has seen the introduction and active promotion of reusable coffee cups within Guild outlets such as Comida! and The Ram in an attempt to reduce Exeter’s carbon footprint (alongside saving money).
University researchers and Guild staff are evidently working to reduce what has been identified as both a risk to wildlife and a risk to humans. A study led by University of Newcastle academics found plastic in wildlife as deep as seven miles under the sea— not to mention the closer issues which can leach into human bodies and the amount of energy which is used to make the tonnes of waste plastic.
Waste energy in of itself is also an issue here at Exeter. Even with timed lights and efforts by students, the energy efficiency rating of Devonshire House (the building in which, ironically, the Green Unit is based) is an E, below the UK average. Despite the often-cited highest tree-to-student ratio of a UK university campus, Streatham evidently isn’t perfect.
The future still looks uneasy with regard to climate change and environmental damage as a whole. Penryn’s Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI) has suggested that the impacts of Climate Change are “already locked in”, and that only the degree of damage can be dictated by humanity. However, it’s a degree of damage that Professor Leyson’s students are hoping to minimise with their campaign.
