FUTURE
Perfect Manchester Metropolitan University is in the top three in the league of green universities. Making sustainability a way of life is the job of Head of Environmental Strategy and Acting Assistant Director of Estates, Dr John Hindley
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recent tweet to Dr John Hindley from a concerned student urged: “I definitely think we should have a meeting about our University’s coffee cups.” In making Manchester Metropolitan University a more sustainable institution, there are big ideas — designing greener buildings, innovative heat and power networks, exploring the possibilities of hydrogen fuel cells — and there are little niggles such as coffee cups. For paper to be recycled, it has to be clean. Used coffee cups are regarded as contaminated. What’s the answer? Reusable cups? Pressing the supplier to find a way to recycle? It’s just one item on a long to-do list for Hindley, Manchester Metropolitan’s Head of Environmental Strategy. That tweet is also a reminder that it is students – inheritors
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Met Magazine issue 2
of whatever planet we leave them – who have helped to push the green agenda to which the University is so successfully responding. Before Hindley’s arrival in December 2007, the University stood at 91 in the People & Planet University League, which measures environmental and ethical performance. In sustainability terms, it was a failing institution. “It was really the students that stamped their feet and said: ‘What’s the University doing about its environmental impact? We want to recycle and we can’t’,” says Hindley. By 2013, Hindley and his 12-strong team had taken the University to number one in that People & Planet League. It remains in the top three today. Previously, Manchester Metropolitan sent 1,300 tonnes
Implementing recycling across the University cost £320,000 in investment, and saved at least that in four or five years
of waste a year to landfill. By embracing recycling and energyfrom-waste technology (burning waste to produce energy) the University today sends less than 13 tonnes to landfill. The aim is zero. “Implementing recycling across the University cost £320,000 in investment, and saved at least that in four or five years,” says Hindley. You cannot go too far in the Manchester Metropolitan campus before spotting recycling bins urging: “Let’s make a sustainable planet.” Not just a sustainable university, then? “Our students come from all over the world, and they go all over the world,” says Hindley. The business case for green thinking is obvious. The University’s gas consumption is now 35 per cent down on a