IncrEdible! How to save money and reduce waste

The new academic year is a chance to get to grips with managing your student loan and kitchen cupboards. Over lockdown the UK wasted a third less food than we usually would. This is brilliant, as normally over 4.5 million tonnes of edible food is wasted from UK homes every year. For students, it’s even higher. The average cost of food waste per student per week is approximately £5.25 – that’s about £273 per year!  It’s not just our bank accounts that are affected by food waste – it’s our planet too.

The process of growing, making, distributing, storing and cooking our food uses masses of energy, fuel and water. It generates 30% of the world’s CO₂ greenhouse gas emissions. The same amount of CO₂ as 4.6 million return flights from London to Perth, Australia! So it makes sense to keep as much food out of the bin as possible, start wasting less and saving more.

Start the new term with some food waste busting, budget cutting, environment loving habits! Here’s five easy ways to reduce food waste from your kitchen.

Conquer the cupboard!

Before you head to the shops, check what’s in your cupboards, fridge and freezer. Make a list and stick to it! Supermarket deals are designed to get you to spend more, and often student accommodation has limited storage space.

Chill the fridge out!

Turn your fridge temperature down to between 0 and 5°C to keep food fresher for longer. Having it too cold can actually spoil some foods!

Freezy does it!

Make the most of your freezer! You can freeze more than you think. Try bulk cooking things like chilli or stews and freeze some portions for when you’re feeling lazy. Check out the Love Food Hate Waste A-Z of Food Storage to double check anything.

Defrost like a boss!

Once you know what’s in the freezer, it just takes a bit of forward planning to save money and avoid a last-minute dash to the shops or Deliveroo.

Use it or lose it!

Get creative with your meal ideas and find ingredient swaps, recipe ideas and leftover hacks on the Love Food Hate Waste website. These are sure to impress your new friends and save you money!

For more information contact sustainability-estates@bristol.ac.uk

The University of Bristol’s Sustainability Team are making a sustainable university, by managing our precious resources, maintaining our sustainable standards and minding our impact on our communities.

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This blog is written by Emma Lewins and Anya Kaufman, Sustainability Interns at the University of Bristol.

Systems thinking: 5 ways to be a more sustainable university

As part of Green Great Britain Week, supported by BEIS, we are posting a series of blogs throughout the week highlighting what work is going on at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment to help provide up to date climate science, technology and solutions for government and industry.  We will also be highlighting some of the big sustainability actions happening across the University and local community in order to do our part to mitigate the negative effects of global warming. Today our blog will look at ‘Considering the actions businesses can take on climate change’.

Our University is justly famous for the breadth and depth of its work on Sustainability. This ranges from research on the effect of micro plastics on the oceans, through food and farming, to the effect of resource-driven migration. We are also tackling arguably the biggest problem of all: developing the tools and techniques that will help us to fight climate change.

Our Sustainability Policy is clear that we need to walk the talk and demonstrate that we are supporting a sustainable world in our operations and strategies.

The University of Bristol’s Sustainability team co-ordinates sustainability activity across the organisation, continually innovating to find ways of reducing our environmental impact against a backdrop of growing staff and student numbers, increasingly bespoke teaching and ever more complex research requirements. The team has particular responsibility for waste resource management, energy, water and transport, and engages with staff and students in many different ways through community engagement, biodiversity activities, sustainable food and sustainable procurement.

1. A changing landscape

The team is led by Martin Wiles, who has been with the University since 2001. “Innovation is at the heart of what we do,” says Martin. “Everyone in the sector knows that the fundamentals are changing, and that change is accelerating. It’s difficult to see what the pedagogical, economic or political landscape is going to be even a year ahead. So, we see our activities as being guided by three principles: how do we support excellence in teaching, research and the staff and student experience? How do we reduce resource use whilst saving money? How do we ensure that we are compliant with increasingly complex environmental legislation? We also feel that we have a role in distilling our findings and disseminating good practice to the wider sector.”

2. Sustainable Laboratories

A good example of how this thinking is applied in practice is the Sustainable Labs Initiative, which focuses on improving the safety, sustainability and success of our laboratories. Energy manager Chris Jones says, “We had known for a long time that our highly-serviced labs represent only 5% of our floor area but use 40% of our energy. In recent years, controls for air handling have improved immensely and we have started to roll out best practice, starting with our Synthetic Chemistry building. We have been able to reduce electricity consumption by 30% there whilst still delivering the same level of service.” The project has been implemented by Chris, working with Anna Lewis, the Team’s Sustainable Labs officer.  A former Research Technician herself, Anna works closely with academic and research staff to minimise resource use by better management. “Staff understand the issues,” says Anna, “and they are very happy to help. We can usually achieve better environmental performance and better safety through relatively small changes to our way of working.”

3. Closing the loop on waste

This sentiment is echoed by Rose Rooney, the Environmental Management System (EMS) and Circular Economy Manager. “If we treat everything in isolation, the task of compliance becomes unnecessarily expensive and intrusive in people’s work. Adhering to the EMS processes saves time and aids compliance. A good example is waste. If we are informed early and fully that a consignment of waste needs to be removed, we can deal with it cheaply and easily, often finding a route for it to be reused or recycled. We are moving away from the idea of waste to becoming a circular economy, where the output from one process becomes the input for another.”  She cites the University’s popular and successful Re-store programme, which allows furniture and equipment from one group to be used by another, and The Bristol Big Give, where students’ unwanted items that would normally go to waste at the end of term are collected and sent to be sold for charities. Many tonnes of items are now being reused that might otherwise have gone to landfill.

4. Be The Change

Bristol Big Give is just one example of a number of behaviour change initiatives delivered by the team to encourage the sustainable behaviours as part of work, study and home life. Maev Moran, Communications and Campaigns Assistant, oversees the delivery of these initiatives: “We have found that audiences respond more positively and proactively to messages of empowerment than to negative messages.  Be The Change, a scheme we launched in June, has quickly become the most popular ongoing initiative among University staff. It covers all areas of sustainability while making rewarding everyday actions, creating a step-by-step guide towards reducing our environmental impact both at home and in the workplace. The breadth of the scheme also means we can factor wellbeing in to our ability to have a positive impact, particularly as part of a wider community.”

5. Travel and transport

Amy Heritage is responsible for Transport at the University, including managing the University’s travel plan, facilities for people who walk or cycle to work or study, the University’s bus services (Bristol Unibus), including the new U2 bus service to Langford and initiatives/incentives to encourage behaviour change on all other modes of travel. “Our Staff and students are great at making sustainable travel choices. Our job is to make this as easy as possible.” She says that our travel plan is a key part in ensuring we are acknowledged as a good corporate citizen, and her team is looking at ways of improving the management of University vehicles and making it more attractive to replace meetings that would otherwise have required flights with video conferences.

Future plans

The team are starting the new academic year with plans for plans for efficiency savings on heating, laboratory ventilation and lighting, making sure we are compliant with new legislation, and collaborative work with Computer Science staff on how the operation of building services translates to staff and student wellbeing. There are plans for more renewable energy generation, smart controls for buildings, and adding to our electric vehicle fleet. “Once more, it’s a project about reducing our environmental impact while freeing up resources for excellent teaching and research, and staff and student wellbeing,” says Martin Wiles, “and that’s what we’re here to do.”

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This blog is written by John Brenton, Sustainability Manager in the University of Bristol’s Sustainability Team.

Read other blogs in this Green Great Britain Week series:
1. Just the tip of the iceberg: Climate research at the Bristol Glaciology Centre
2. Monitoring greenhouse gas emissions: Now more important than ever?
3. Digital future of renewable energy
4. The new carbon economy – transforming waste into a resource
5. Systems thinking: 5 ways to be a more sustainable university
6. Local students + local communities = action on the local environment

The new carbon economy – transforming waste into a resource

As part of Green Great Britain Week, supported by BEIS, we are posting a series of blogs throughout the week highlighting what work is going on at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment to help provide up to date climate science, technology and solutions for government and industry.  We will also be highlighting some of the big sustainability actions happening across the University and local community in order to do our part to mitigate the negative effects of global warming. Today our blog will look at ‘Technologies of the future: clean growth and innovation’.

On Monday 8 October 2018, the IPCC released a special report which calls upon world governments to enact policies which will limit global warming to 1.5°C compared with pre-industrial levels, failure to do so will drastically increase the probability of ecosystem collapses, extreme weather events and complete melting of Arctic sea ice. Success will require “rapid and far-reaching” actions in the way we live, move, produce and consume.

So, what comes to mind when you hear carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas? A waste product? You’re not wrong to think that given the predicament that our planet faces, but this article is going to tell the other side of the story which you already know but is often forgotten.

For over a billion years, carbon dioxide has been trapped and transformed, almost miraculously, into an innumerable, rich and complex family of organic molecules and materials by photosynthetic organisms. Without this process, life as we know simply would not have evolved. Look around you, – I dare say that the story of carbon dioxide is weaved, one way or another into all the objects you see around you in this moment. Whether it’s the carbon atoms within the material itself – or that old fossilised sourced of carbon was used to smelt, melt or fabricate it.

The great growth and development of the last two centuries has been defined by humanity’s use of fossilised carbon which drove the first and second industrial revolutions. But now – the limitations of those very revolutions are staring us in the face and a new revolution is already underway, albeit it quietly.

An industrial revolution is said to occur when there is a step change in three forms of technology, Information, Transport and Energy. The step change that I will discuss here is the use of carbon dioxide coupled with renewable energy systems to deliver a circular carbon economy that aims to be sustainable, carbon neutral at worst and carbon negative at best. This burgeoning field comes under the name carbon capture and utilisation (CCU). CCU, represents a broad range of chemical processes that will most directly impact energy storage and generation and the production of chemical commodities including plastics and building aggregates such as limestone.

In our research we are developing catalysts made of metal nanoparticles to activate and react CO2 to form chemicals such as carbon monoxide (CO), formic acid, methanol and acetate. They be simple molecules – but they have significant industrial relevance, are made on vast scales, are energy intensive to produce, and all originate in some way from coal. The methods that we are investigating while being more technically challenging, consume just three inputs – CO2, water and an electrical current. We use a device called an electrolyser, it uses electricity to break chemical bonds and form new ones. The catalyst sits on the electrodes. At the anode, water is broken into positively charged hydrogen ions called protons and oxygen, while at the opposite electrode, the cathode, CO2 reacts with the protons, H+, to form new molecules. It sounds simple but encouraging CO2 to react is not easy, compared to most molecules, CO2 is a stubborn reactant. It needs the right environment and some energy such as heat, electricity or light to activate it to form products of higher energy content. The chemicals that can be produced by this process are industrially significant, they are used in chemical synthesis, as solvents, reactants and many other things. CO for example can be built up to form cleaner burning petroleum/diesel-like fuels, oils, lubricants and other products derived by the petrochemical industry.

Formic acid and methanol may be used to generate energy, they can be oxidised back to CO2 and H2O using a device called a fuel cell to deliver electricity efficiently without combustion. One day we could see electrically driven cars not powered by batteries or compressed hydrogen but by methanol which has a higher volumetric energy density than both batteries and hydrogen. Batteries are heavy, too short-lived and use high quantities of low abundance metals such as lithium and cobalt – meaning their supply chains could suffer critical issues in the future. While the compression of hydrogen is an energy intensive process which poses greater safety challenges.

However, there are still many hurdles to overcome. I recently went to the Joint European Summer School on Fuel Cell, Electrolyser and Battery Technologies. There I learned about the technical and economic challenges from an academic and industrial perspective. In an introductory lecture, Jens Oluf Jensen was asked “When will we run out of fossil fuels?”, his answer “Not soon enough!”. An obvious answer but there is something I wish to unpick. The task for scientists is not just to make technologies like CO2 capture, CO2 conversion and fuel cells practical – which I would argue is already the case for some renewable technological processes. The greatest challenge is to make them cost competitive with their oil-based equivalents. A gamechanger in this field will be the day that politicians enact policies which incorporate the cost to the environment in the price of energy and materials derived from fossil fuels, and even go so far as to subsidise the cost of energy and materials-based on their ability to avoid or trap carbon dioxide.

Even without such political input there is still hope as we’ve seen the cost of solar and wind drop dramatically, lower than some fossil fuel-based power sources and only with limited government support. Already there are companies springing up in the CCU sector. Companies like Climeworks and Carbon Engineering are demonstrating technology that can trap CO2 using a process known as Direct Air Capture (DAC). Carbon Engineering is going even further and developing a technology they call Air to Fuels™. They use CO2 from the air, hydrogen split from water and clean electricity to generate synthetic transportation fuels such as gasoline, diesel or jet fuel. You may question why we should need these fuels given the rise of battery powered vehicles but a better solution for fuelling heavy goods vehicles, cargo ships and long-haul flights is at the very least a decade way.

In 1975, Primo Levi wrote a story about a carbon dioxide molecule and he said in relation to photosynthesis “dear colleagues, when we learn to do likewise we will be sicut Deus [like God], and we will have also solved the problem of hunger in the world.”. The circular carbon economy may still be in its infancy, but the seeds have sprouted. Unlike the first and second industrial revolution, the 3rd industrial revolution will not be dependent on one single energy source but will be a highly interdependent network of technologies that support and complement each other in the aim of sustainability, just like nature itself.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Gaël Gobaille-Shaw, University of Bristol School of Chemistry. He is currently designing new electrocatalysts for the conversion of CO2 to liquid fuels.
For updates on this work, follow @CatalysisCDT @Gael_Gobaille and @UoB_Electrochem on Twitter.  Follow #GreenGB for updates on the Green Great Britain Week.

Gael Gobaille-Shaw

Read other blogs in this Green Great Britain Week series:
1. Just the tip of the iceberg: Climate research at the Bristol Glaciology Centre
2. Monitoring greenhouse gas emissions: Now more important than ever?
3. Digital future of renewable energy
4. The new carbon economy – transforming waste into a resource
5. Systems thinking: 5 ways to be a more sustainable university
6. Local students + local communities = action on the local environment

 

Contemporary Eco-Cities: An improvement on previous work?

History offers up many grand ideas for how urban planning and design can be used to improve cities and society to be more sustainable and liveable. These ideas include early urban reforms by David Dale, Robert Owen, and Titus Salt, Benjamin Ward Richardson’s City of Health, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Contemporary City, amongst others. The eco-city, as an idea that initially developed out of the 1960s grassroots environmental movement, should be considered within this long tradition of ideas for the betterment of cities. The construction of ‘eco-cities’ in the recent decade has also been controversial. The aim of this article is to introduce the ideas and practices of contemporary eco-cities and to discuss the extent to which they can be regarded as an improvement on the work of previous urban reformers.

Eco-city concept and development stages of eco-cities

The term ‘eco-city’ was first coined in 1987 by US-based eco-city pioneer Richard Register as ‘an urban environmental system in which input (of resources) and output (of waste) are minimised’. As the eco-city concept began to be used more extensively, it became more broadly defined, ergo, there is no single accepted definition in the literature. Recognising and permeating ideas of nature in the city into the concept of sustainable cities should be considered essential in setting a framework for eco-cities. This idea can be seen as a continuation of planning trends which attempted to reconcile the nature-city relationship, beginning with Howard’s Garden City movement. The approach is also novel, in that it represented a wide range of factors which coalesce around sustainability in the contemporary context of global climate change, environmental degradation and environmental politics.

There are three stages in the development of eco-city. Early initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s were locally-oriented, bottom-up approaches which aimed to improve environmental conditions, with only few examples of practical projects. The period of 1990s to early 2000s marked the emerging stage of eco-city development, when balanced sustainable development was adopted as a principal objective. At this stage, national and municipal governments started to develop eco-cities and eco-towns, most of which were redevelopments or expansions of existing towns and cities as demonstration projects. Successful examples include eco-towns in Japan and small-scale ones in Europe. Since the mid-2000s, a number of ambitious built-from-scratch eco-city masterplans have emerged, aiming to make entire towns and cities highly sustainable. These top-down proposals are occurring predominantly in Asia, including the highly publicised Dongtan Eco-City, Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City and Caofeidian Eco-City in China and the Masdar City which was proposed as a zero-carbon city in the UAE. The latter two stages of eco-cities are the foci in the following discussion, considering the development scale and significance.

General visions and planning of contemporary eco-cities

Contemporary eco-cities and eco-towns are, in general, an improvement on previous ideas and works in terms of their visions, planning and objectives.

Almost all smaller eco-town plans and holistic eco-city blueprints in recent years are emerging as reflections of and responses to the global context of climate change and environmental degradation, with emphasis on cutting-edge technology, clean energy, and circular economy to achieve sustainable living. This indicates that the finiteness of resources as well as the ecosystem itself has been more extensively recognised. This is an improvement from earlier works. Earlier works targeted urban problems including sanitation and personal health in the case of ‘Hygeia, City of Health’ by Richardson in 1876, and poor working and living conditions in the case of Saltaire and New Lanark, but hardly realised the limits of the environment. An example was Howard’s claim in his 1902 book Garden Cities of Tomorrow: ‘…to a more noble use of its infinite treasures. The earth for all practical purposes may be regarded as abiding forever’. Today’s improvement leads to the consideration of intergenerational ecological justice, being an essential principle of the development of eco-cities.

Moreover, there are three forms of eco-city projects identified: new developments, expansions of urban areas, and retrofits where existing cities adopt eco-city principles. Unlike earlier visionaries such as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier who tended to reject the idea of gradual improvements to the conditions of existing cities in favour of comprehensive transformations of the urban environment, the planning of contemporary eco-cities/towns includes various forms of urban development and redevelopment. Whilst the ambitiously proposed built-from-scratch eco-cities in China and the UAE belong to the first type, most examples of smaller-scale ones in Japan, Germany, Scandinavia, and the UK are expansions of urban areas and retrofits, which is an improvement in terms of development forms.

Implementations and outcomes of contemporary eco-cities

The implementations and outcomes of contemporary eco-cities at early stage of the development in the 1990s and early 2000s are an improvement upon early urban reformers in many aspects, while those at current development stage may vary in light of different contexts. It is doubtful that the prospects of these newly-built eco-cities might be an improvement.

At the early stage, contemporary eco-cities and eco-towns were mainly developed in Japan and central and northern Europe, exemplifying the eco-cities in Germany. During this stage, a distinctive characteristic of small-to-moderate-scale developments is that they gave equal weighting to the environmental, economic and social aspects of their design and integrated them well.

The Eco-Town Program was launched in Japan in 1997 through national initiatives and municipal redevelopment planning in order to deal with waste management issues, industrial pollution and to stimulate new industry development during a time of economic stagnation. The Eco-Town concept in Japan originally focused on Industrial Symbiosis—the iconic 3R application of Industrial Ecology which concerns ‘the productivity and environmental impacts of resources in industrial societies’ (McManus 2005). The theory then extended to Urban Symbiosis to become part of the Eco-City concept, focusing on overall urban planning and urban ecosystems, civil society and greening of cities. The implementation of this program and the successful development of 26 eco-towns, which focused mainly on circular economy and environmentally conscious planning, highlight three major aspects of improvement on earlier urban reformers. First, the government put in place a comprehensive legal framework for becoming a recycling-based society. This action provides a legislative foundation, imposes a sense of duty, and reduces the risk for further transition and development in industries and society, which is a practical improvement on the ideas of earlier reformers which were often hard to carry out (in a large scale) without legislative basis. Second, the program emphasised a combination of initiatives from public sector, business sector and, especially, civil society. There were a number of citizen activities emerging during that period and engaging in the program, which stands in contrast to places like Saltaire that were largely paternal. Third, the program was carried out mainly in the form of redevelopment and retrofitting projects, which faced less trouble than those early built-from-scratch ideas because it could take advantages of existing social capital.

There are also two smaller-scale eco-town examples in Freiburg, Germany: Vauban and Rieselfeld. These two district-scale projects are expansion of the city in response to the increasing population. They were carefully planned and developed with foci on public transport, dense but diverse housing, and environmental buildings. A major improvement on earlier works includes the emphasis on public transport, as these two districts were designed to minimise car dependency, given that 35% of residents in Vauban have abstained from driving (Beatley 2012). Le Corbusier’s fetishisation of the automobile in his La Ville Radieuse (1967) is of little relevance considering today’s traffic congestion, the high energy consumption, and air quality concerns associated with automobiles. These two examples successfully demonstrate how public transport can contribute to urban and environmental sustainability.

At the current stage (since mid-2000s), contemporary eco-cities are primarily proposed to be built from scratch, on a grand scale. They would represent highly sustainable, experimental flagships, most of which are promoted by the Chinese national and municipal governments including examples such as the Masdar City in the UAE. The characteristic of these projects is they are predominantly entrepreneurial cities and tend to prioritise economic concerns over environmental ones. In terms of implementation and outcomes, these new cities sometimes fail to demonstrate improvements on previous works, with uncertainty remaining considering that many of them are still under construction.

Due to rapid population influx, emissions pressure and pollution issues, the Chinese state government encourages local governments to experiment the ‘eco-city’ as a flagship project for new technologies and ‘sustainable’ economic and ecological urban development. Highly publicised projects include Dongtan Eco-City on Chongming Island, Shanghai, Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city and Caofeidian Eco-City. The first project, Dongtan Eco-City, has already been stalled due to issues of land quotas. The subsequent Caofeidian Eco-City, claiming to be a renewable energy city, has only completed a few buildings and failed to attract residents, suffering from huge debt and being indefinitely postponed. The only project that has come close to completion is the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city, which has not been developed without issues and is still of little improvement upon earlier urban reformers. It is being developed according to 26 sustainability indicators (Fig. 1), demonstrating the progressive practices within the Chinese context, although many of them are taken for granted in the West. There are many problems in the construction. The city claimed to promote green transport but the implementation of numerous highways are still the dominant transport structure in the city, accompanied by high-rise residential buildings, which is a strong resemblance of the type of city Le Corbusier imagined for ‘the contemporary city’. There is even less open green space compared with Le Corbusier’s ideas. Additionally, this city has only managed to attract 6000 residents thus far—far less than its objective. There is also hardly any inclusion of social sustainability, where there should be relevant viable attempts, as Caprotti states (2015), ‘the view of sustainability which is concerned purely with a city’s environmental footprint, or with its economic success is severely limited’.

26 Key performance indicators to measure success (Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Investment and Development Co.,Ltd 2015)

In the case of Masdar City, the so-called ‘carbon-neutral city’ (recently modified to be ‘low- carbon city’) initiatives are just a part in making Abu Dhabi a leader in the industry of renewable energy technologies, which does not include many real actions with reconciliation of the nature-human relationship. An exception to the Asian ambitions of the eco-city is the Eco-town plan in the UK, which may constitute an improvement on earlier works. Those eco-towns proposed by the North West Bicester, which are an expansion of existing urban areas, aim for affordable housing and promoting social justice.

In conclusion, the contemporary eco-cities, from the early emerging stage of the1990s till today, are in general, an improvement upon the work of earlier urban reformers in terms of their ideas and planning. Whilst the early-stage developments such as Eco-towns in Japan demonstrate an improvement in terms of practical implementations and existing outcomes, brand-new built-from-scratch eco-cities may not be sustainable in reality in light of different contexts.  They tend to prioritise economic goals instead of environmental concerns. Whether these newly built eco-cities will be an improvement on those of earlier reformers remains uncertain. The developments which have begun, however, provide lessons for future urban developments which can be introduced to improve future designs and the redevelopment of existing cities.

Blog by Cabot Institute Masters Research Fellow Shiyao (Silvia) Liu.






Further reading

Beatley, T., 2012. Green cities of Europe: global lessons on green urbanism, Washington DC, Island Press.
Caprotti, F., 2015, Eco-Cities and the Transition to Low Carbon Economies, Palgrave.
Howard, E., 1902, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, London: Swan Sonnenschein.
Le Corbusier, 1967, The Radiant City (La Ville Radieuse): Elements of a doctrine of urbanism to be used as the basis of our machine-age civilization, New York, The Orion Press.
McManus, P., 2005, Vortex Cities to Sustainable Cities: Australia’s Urban Challenge, UNSW Press, Sydney.
Register, R., 1987, Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Richardson, B.W., 1876, Hygeia, A city of health. MacMillan & Co., London.
Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Investment and Development Co.,Ltd. 2015, Tianjin Eco City website,  http://www.tianjineco-city.com/en/index.aspx

Bristol 2015 Student Day: Young peoples ideas for the future

The Bristol Student Day for the Bristol Festival of Ideas was all about the future. Cabot Institute director Rich Pancost opened the day with the remark: ‘This is your planet, it is no longer my generation’s’. What he says is true; young people are soon to inherit positions as policy makers, CEOs and decision makers. Student’s visions for the future may soon become a reality, so what are their visions?

Bristol 2015: Student Day at At-Bristol. Organised by Bristol Festival of Ideas

The student day was orchestrated to produce a dialogue for the University of Bristol and UWE student’s opinions on some of the planet’s greatest problems. The thoughts generated will become part of Bristol’s message to the world in at the COP21, a global sustainable innovation forum in Paris later this year.

The discussions ranged from local cycling routes to global overpopulation. The breadth of topics covered meant discussions oscillated between worldwide concerns and university-based issues.  Regardless of scale, the prevailing desire was for increased suitability for the future generations.

Bikes parked at the University of
Bristol.  Image credit: Emily Gillingham

On a university level the participants expressed discontent with the institution’s reliance on fossil fuels with many agreeing they would like to see increased investment in sustainable energy for their organisations. Financial returns from green energy may be long term but if any institution can expect longevity it’s a university- why should their energy solutions not reflect that?

Waste reduction was an additional point for local improvement with participants venturing ideas such as a ban on single use coffee cups and increased recycling opportunities on campus. There was no shortage of creative ideas, the main issue was implementation and education; how can young people convince their less green-minded peers that such schemes are essential? Food waste was of additional concern, with unanimous support for schemes such as the Bristol Skipchen. The desire to see projects such as this affiliated with the university was a common vision.

Naturally, food was an issue close to the heart of many students and discussion quickly progressed to agriculture. Organic food was considered a luxury for personal health purposes, but its environmental benefit was surprisingly contentious. Many students believed that large scale, non-organic, industrialised farming is more energy efficient and produces fewer emissions, while others believe smaller organic farms are the future of agriculture.

The boundaries of the discussion were pushed both mentally and geographically as the day progressed.  The younger generation’s global responsibilities were also high priority for discussion. Overpopulation in the developing world is putting strain on resources- how can Bristol students help? Food waste reduction was high on the list of solutions, as well as the universal need for more environmentally attractive power solutions, from the first to third world.

The enthusiasm of the participants to build a better, greener and more sustainable future made the discussion both interesting and beneficial. If there is one thing the day has shown, it’s that young people have the desire for long term solutions. After all, it is the millions of small ideas such as the ones discussed in At-Bristol that will shape the future for us all.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Keri McNamara, a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Further reading

Ethics and sustainability in University of Bristol catering

Sustainable waste management at the University of Bristol

Read more about all the sustainability initiatives taking place at the University of Bristol

2nd Generation biofuels: a transdisciplinary dialogue

“Globally, there are politically important evidence gaps, but nationally, those evidence gaps are just not important enough for policy-makers to take account of them”.  
 
This was one comment summing up the discussion I had at a workshop on the development of 2nd generation, or cellulosic, biofuels (biofuels produced from crops or waste, that is not otherwise used as food).  The workshop’s aim was to produce ‘A transdisciplinary dialogue on the opportunities and challenges of cellulosic ethanol in the UK’, and was run by Dr. Kate Millar, the Director of the Centre for Applied Bioethics.  It was part of a number of events convened for the EU Framework 7 project, “Integrated EST-Framework” (EST-Frame).  Bringing together 12 scientists, engineers, environmental scientists and social scientists is not an easy feat, but the 24 hours’ of the workshop produced some extremely interesting discussions.
My own research considers endeavours to overcome some of the sustainability problems commonly associated with 1st generation biofuels (e.g. sugarcane and wheat), and so I was particularly interested in how the development of 2nd generation biofuels might change the sustainability landscape. Would many of the problems associated with biofuels in general – increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions when compared with fossil fuels, land grabbing, food insecurity and biodiversity loss – disappear if we were to start producing 2nd generation biofuels? 

Policy problems 

Oilseed rape grown for  1st
generation biofuel has limitations.
Image credit: Richard Webb
Much of the first day of the workshop was spent discussing ‘policy problems’ that would need to be overcome for the successful production of cellulosic biofuel for consumption in the UK. 2nd generation biofuels have not been viably commercialised to date largely because of the cost of production.  But this is not the only policy problem to be overcome.  2nd generation biofuel will not only come from ‘waste’, but also from crops, such as miscanthus, which are specifically grown as biofuel feedstock.  But policies to encourage the use of crop residues for biofuels, depend, first, upon the categorisation of the cellulose left behind in the farming of particular crops as ‘waste’ and, second, upon a decision that the ‘best’ use of that waste is its conversion to energy.  This decision may, in turn, depend upon an assumption relating to national energy security.
 
When discussing the problems that would need to be overcome for the production of 2nd generation biofuel, it soon became clear that our own understanding of the problems depended upon the frames through which they were envisioned, and/or the assumptions that might be made in even categorising them as problems in the first place. Such frames and assumptions need to be unpicked when making policy decisions relating to, for example, the ‘best’ use of land, the ‘best’ conversion processes, displacement effects resulting from the adoption of those policies, and the valuations made in assessing ‘costs’ resulting from the production of such biofuels.
 

Indirect land use change (ILUC)

 
One thorny issue relating to biofuels production has been that of ILUC.  ILUC has been a huge spoke in the wheel of policy-makers’ development of policy in relation to the development of biofuels, not only in the UK, but in the EU, and further afield.  Endeavouring to tackle this issue involves identifying potential knock-on effects resulting from direct land use change to biofuels feedstocks (whether 1st or 2nd generation). These might include increased GHG emissions, erosion, biodiversity loss, or increased insecurity in relation to land rights or food supply of local people.  
 
While the focus of policy-makers’ concerns in relation to ILUC has to date been GHG emissions, views in relation to all of these issues also depend upon one’s assumptions/framing.  Furthermore, such issues are by their very definition uncertain (because they involve future potential scenarios) and, in tackling each of them, require policy-makers to give value (either positive or negative value) to those potential scenarios.  Some of the values endowed by policy-makers in assessing indirect or direct land use change may be quantifiable.  Others, such as the values given by local people to their landscape before it is transformed for biofuel feedstocks, may not be.  Moreover, land use change resulting from policies made in the UK, may be taking place in countries as far afield as Africa or South East Asia, for example.  
While some participants thought that this demonstrated that even endeavouring to tackle an issue such as ILUC was purely altruistic, and therefore usually not important enough for national policy-makers to be swayed by, others argued that it was not altruism that demanded its recognition, but an appreciation of the integrated nature of our world, its people and environment, and markets for feedstocks.  Without actively sympathising with policy-makers, many participants recognised that there are no right answers when it comes to ILUC.
 

Need for a holistic approach in policy-making

 
Image by Steve Jurvetson
When discussion moved on to consider the types of evidence required for policy-makers to tackle the policy problems, we soon realised that different forms of ‘evidence’ were often integrated.  Moreover, it was not lack of evidence that was the problem for policy-makers, or even ambiguity and uncertainty in the evidence, but the appraisal of that evidence.  This requires political decisions to be taken, something that policy-makers seem, ironically, to be distinctly uncomfortable with in relation to this area.
 
The workshop was a valuable exercise.  To paraphrase one participant: many of the technical or economic issues relating to the development of cellulosic biofuels in the UK could be resolved by taking a very narrow view of the problem.  However, such issues do encompass wider issues.  Countering the scientists’ and engineers’ ‘problem-solving’ approaches to policy issues, with social scientists’ more critical understanding of the social issues surrounding the problems is always going to be a challenge, but one that, I believe, is crucial if those problems are really going to be solved with any success.

This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Elizabeth Fortin, University of Bristol Law School.