Making strides towards reducing our reliance on single-use plastics, the Atrium at Jubilee Campus is now trialling removal of problematic single-use plastics including condiment sachets, single-serve jam packets and paper salt, pepper and sugar sachets.
The Atrium at Jubilee campus is the hub for the 600 students living at Newark and Southwell halls on the campus, serving breakfast and dinner throughout the week and brunch at weekends. Lunch is also available to all students, staff and visitors to the campus between Monday and Friday.
As well as butter and jam packets used during breakfast service for each diner, up to a dozen different sauces can be served during the evening meal. This means hundreds of single-serve sachets used every week during term being binned. Condiments are now offered in bottles which are recyclable at end of life, and breakfast butter and jam are waste free.
It is expected that if this trial proves successful with diners it will be expanded to catered halls on University Park to coincide with the new intake of students this September.
Students’ Union Environment and Social Justice Officer 2018-19 Bonni Jee added: "I would like to express my thanks to Bob Crossley for taking on the feedback so enthusiastically and taking the bold step forward which will immediately save hundreds of single-use items from disposal daily, without compromising on the range or quality on offer and improving the experience for students. I hope this will spark a wider removal 'avoidable' single use items across campus, and we are already beginning to see progress at University Park halls with the phasing out of sauce sachets once existing stocks are used up, which will prevent thousands of sachets from disposal daily, but there is still progress to be made, for example fruit salads are still coming in individual plastic pots.”
Single-serve sachets are a problem waste: they are not recyclable due to being made from many materials tightly bound together, similar to disposable coffee cups. Avoiding waste and moving towards more durable alternatives is part of our WasteNott campaign to cut down on single-use plastics and disposables across our campuses. Find out more about the campaign here.
Posted on Monday 3rd June 2019