Sustainability at the University of Sheffield
Our ethical and environmental commitments
As a civic institution, The University of Sheffield recognises the role we play locally, nationally and internationally. Throughout our catering, event and hospitality services we are committed to high standards of ethical and environmental practices – through using our power of procurement to support the local economy, through to minimising supply chains and leveraging the power of the University to positively impact the communities where we source our products.
Sustainability is at the heart of everything we do and our efforts to support local businesses, reduce our carbon footprint and ensure we are using the best possible products in the forefront in our mind. We have access to many industry professionals at the University with a wealth of knowledge and experience and we utilise these people to help us make informed and researched decisions for every product we use.
Wherever possible, we use local suppliers
We follow the motto ‘Think local, act global’ as it’s important to us that as many of our ingredients as possible are ethically sourced. Wherever possible we work with local suppliers from butchers to greengrocers, from dairy farms to coffee roasters. Using local produce not only ensures that our customers get the freshest products possible – for instance, our milk comes from cow to coffee in as little as three hours courtesy of Our Cow Molly, but reduces delivery emissions and creates jobs in the local area.
We also worked with Our Cow Molly to create a ‘stainless steel milk churn’ in order to reduce our plastic waste by 27,000 single use bottles per year. Each churn holds around 22 pints of milk and can be washed, refilled and reused. This also cut our carbon footprint of milk delivery to the University by over 65% – equivalent to 6.5 tonnes of C02 every year.
Our conference facilities
The University of Sheffield has a wide variety of buildings throughout Sheffield. These are a blend of modern buildings such as the Diamond, and historic buildings such as Firth Court. Our most recent building, The Wave, was designed with sustainability at it’s heart. The Wave achieved an ‘Outstanding’ grade from the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method and was awarded Social Infrastructure Project of the Year at the British Construction Industry Awards 2024.
Features include the innovative use of local materials with long life cycles to reduce the building’s waste and embodied carbon. The building is largely made out of glass which has reduced the amount of lighting required during the building’s operation. Double glazing was chosen over triple glazing as with this specific building design, it is the lower carbon option.
Our fuel and power is green
Another feature at The Wave is the Geo-Exchange System which maximises the opportunity created by thermal warmth: providing cooling in the summer and heating in winter. A heat-conductive liquid is circulated through boreholes into the earth, picking up or getting rid of heat depending on the time of year. Using low-carbon electricity, the heat pump concentrates this heat and circulates it throughout the building, but it can also operate in reverse, collecting heat from the building’s air and expelling it into the ground.
This ties in with our policy of procuring 100% renewable energy, maintaining our £0 invested in fossil fuels since our divestment from fossil fuel company shares in 2019.
Our fleet of delivery vehicles has gone electric
We have a full fleet of electric delivery vehicles driving around campus. We always aim to keep deliveries to a minimum and use a vehicle tracking system to ensure our delivery schedule is as eco-friendly as possible. Our hospitality service team are also based on campus and are on foot to get round all of your bookings to set everything up and clear down again… You should see their weekly step count!
Water, water, water
We do not sell small bottles of water. We have water systems installed across the University which anyone can access to fill up their water bottles. We actively encourage conference delegates to bring their own bottles and use these water points.
We also use a water filter system in some of our dedicated conference venues which allows us to use reusable glass bottles for our conferences, meetings and events.
Single use cups
The impact of single use coffee cups on the environment is well documented. We have undertaken a number of sustainable initiatives in order to minimise our single cup waste – from financial incentives for bringing your own container to trialling a coffee cup return scheme across campus and placing crockery into over 95% of our outlets. Currently we are on track to reduce the number of single use cups on campus by over 100,000 this academic year.
Reusable platters and disposables
We transport our food from production to venue as safely as possible. To help with this, we use a range of platters and lids that are collected by the team when the event is over, recycled and reused at least five times before they need to be disposed of.
Our disposable plates and cutlery are made from a plant based material called sugarcane bagasse. This material has a low carbon footprint due to the fact that the production process uses much less energy than a plastic equivalent.
Reduce, reuse, recycle
We use the waste hierarchy framework to evaluate our processes and practices across all areas of our business – wherever we can, we have made reductions in waste creation, switched to reusable containers and as a last resort ensured that our products are recyclable. Where possible we use crockery to serve our customers, particularly on large scale conferences and events. However, where this isn’t possible due to logistical reasons, we always use the best products available to us.
We have an incredible team of industry experts here at the University, who work with us to do our due diligence and look at the life cycle of the products, right from production to end of life, to ensure that the products we use are as sustainably minded as they can be.
Food waste management
As part of waste reduction, we work in collaboration with students at the University, supporting the Save our Sandwiches organisation. Their mission is to reduce food waste whilst supporting vulnerable people in Sheffield by redistributing any surplus food from University events and meetings to homeless charities to help those in need.
Other initiatives to tackle food waste include the launch of community fridges in Endcliffe & Ranmoor where unused food is placed into the fridges and is freely available for students and members of the community to help themselves to. In the first three months of the fridge’s availability we saved over five tonnes of food which would have otherwise been discarded.
