In February we joined 300 student, staff and alumni teams at Ingenuity18’s Ideas Summit, pitching the challenge of reducing the University’s consumption of single-use plastics. You can read more in our blog.
We received loads of ideas from teams, covering everything from on-site bottle deposit schemes, installation of additional water fountains across all campuses, revolutionising our recycling points with laser recognition, and schemes to hold the attention of our University community and to encourage individual commitments to consume less single-use plastic.
Two winners stood out from the pitches submitted. Led by Flavia Villarroel, Abalyn McMullen and Paul Bilan, our second place team identified convenience as being at the heart of our dependence on single-use plastics, recognising education as being key to beginning to change people’s behaviours. The team also identified the potential for a campus wide cup reuse scheme, where a hot drinks cup could be returned to any catering outlet, offering the convenience of a disposable cup with the environmental impact of a reusable.
Our first place winner, a team lead by Ellie McCall, Daisy Mason, Cherry Anderson, Arnoldo Villafana and Abbie-Gayle Johnson, proposed a large scale campaign around single-use plastics across campuses. Using a visual representation plastic waste, students and staff will observe how quickly their waste adds up. Linking the observable effects of plastic use with messaging from Blue Planet II, the idea is also scalable to the wider Nottingham community.
Asked about her team's ideas, Ellie McCall shared: "As we all take for granted how lucky we are to even have access to free water, we hope that this [project] would only further incentive students to reduce their single-use plastic and make a positive impact elsewhere within the world."
Posted on Tuesday 1st May 2018