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“What does a sustainable hairdresser look like?” John Hindley drops this odd question in the middle of our interview. His examples seem almost too obvious – “more efficient hairdryers … less packaging, recycling,” – and he later points out why it’s not so easy to think outside of the box. “It’s just not internalised to universities that out in business, graduates with an atitude, experience and skills of sustainability and its issues are a lot more employable than those graduates that don’t have an awareness of sustainability.” In the last decade, sustainability has
gone from being a small-scale concern to an all-encompassing philosophy for academic education, architecture and administration. As the Head of Environmental Strategy at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), Hindley and his team have been responsible for a sea change in the way the University approaches its sustainable initiatives, whether that involves liaising with senior management to consult on procurement, or whether it’s “riding a seven-seater bike around campus looking absolute fools to highlight sustainable travel.” MMU’s latest prized developments
are the Business School, which opened in 2012, and the Birley Fields campus, which is set to open in September 2014. Both of these academic buildings have been designed to the standards set by the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) for Excellence, offering an abundance of energy efficient features including photovoltaic cells and ground sourced heat pumps. Along with a revamp of the estates for the Manchester School of Art, the buildings are part of a £350m overhaul of the University’s campuses, consolidating their far-flung learning centres into two locations in Manchester and Cheshire. Of the three new developments,
Birley Fields is the crown jewel, offering what Hindley calls: “The three zeroes approach … zero water, zero waste, zero carbon.” At MMU, this approach isn’t just the net result of eco-friendly design – instead, it begins on the first day of construction. “We monitor the performance of the construction through really quite strict environmental key performance indicators (KPIs) on a month by month basis. So how much electricity they’re using on site, how much water they’re using on site, how much waste they’re creating.” These energy saving initiatives even stretch
TOP: Gloucestershire VC Stephen Marston ABOVE: Gloucestershire staff on the community farm
to using prefabricated concrete slabs and structures, along with testing the uses of hydrogen fuel cell electricity as part of their leading work in the Greater Manchester Hydrogen Partnership. The stellar work done by MMU’s
Environment Team has seen them leap from 91st place on the 2007 People & Planet (P&P) Green League table to 1st place in the 2013 rankings. The League table mimics the graduation process, offering a ‘first’ down to a ‘fail’ for the environmental policy and performance of universities in the UK.
Hannah Smith, who works as Green League Manager with the small team at People & Planet, points out that this gimmick is, “a vehicle for some really serious issues within the methodology of the Green League’s data samples.” Sure enough, People & Planet’s
methodology isn’t light work: the team compile the results of over 150 surveys on sustainability policies, which are sent to publicly funded universities under a Freedom of Information request; the universities in question are then given eight weeks to collate evidence and
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