The Bedfordshire Green Hub empowers students to lead sustainability action within the University of Bedfordshire and beyond, through initiatives ranging from a 'Pop Up Green Pod' to a 'Student Eats Garden'.

The Pop up Green Pod has widened local community engagement by teaching sustainability and healthy eating in a fun and interactive manner.

A range of events and activities have taken place across different campuses, raising student and staff engagement with the sustainability agenda. Highlights include an end of year clothes donation that prevented many items going to landfill, food donations drives in order to prevent left over food going into landfill at the end of the academic year or semester, fairtrade fortnight events, and a very successful Go Green Week.

Students have also facilitated a Student Swap Shop and instigated a research project installing indoor office plants to the students union office. Research has also been carried out into; recycling, university recycling performance, coffee cup recycling, and they plan to carry out further research in the future.

The Students' Union have also implemented various policy frameworks in order to ensure that they can continue to work towards a more sustainable and eco-friendly environment for students. They have also created a vision plan and an operational plan to show what they aim for within the student union and across the university campuses in order to make environmentally friendly improvements. This was following the identification of five main issues surrounding the environment and sustainability at the university which were; the recycling of coffee cups, the volume of paper used, the high energy usage, the performance of on campus recycling, and the level of mileage claimed.

In 2016, the Students' Union gained funding for a campaign that promoted using the stairs rather than the elevators, switched to Starbucks in order to increase the availability of Fairtrade products, closed their highest energy using building, and increased their digital communications in order to lower the quantity of paper used within the Student Union offices.

So far in 2017, the Students' Union have completed research into the recycling of coffee cups on university campuses, researched into students' views on recycling, ensured an increase in the ability to recycle on campus, and formed an agreement with the University that coffee grinds will be collected separately starting from September 2017.

Want to get involved?

• Join the Enactus Society
• Take part in sustainable volunteering
• Suggest a new idea or project to the Students' Union
• Create your own society
• Become a PAL (Peer Assisted Learning) leader to help improve student participation in sustainable and environmentally friendly activities and habits.
• Become a 'Accreditation Scheme' by taking part in environmentally friendly volunteering, projects, and/or societies.
• Run in the next Students' Union elections for a full time executive position in order to make the changes you wish to see within the Union and across the University campuses.

For more information contact Beds SU at beds.su@beds.ac.uk