Sustainability

Ravensbourne Students’ Union is dedicated to becoming a sustainable organisation. We know that many of our activities have a negative impact on the environment but attempt to minimise this through constant management and review of our activities. To show this, we have decided to enter the RSU into the Green Impact award scheme this year.

How we do it

Annually, the students elect a Sustainability Officer to form part of the Union and represent them on green issues. The Officer is responsible for gathering student ideas and thoughts about green policy and developing them in coordination with the Union, Institution management and the Green Steering Group (GSG). This year’s Sustainability Officer is Tom Riglar; you can contact him by email tom(at)ravesu.co.uk or directly through RSU.

Our campus

We are very lucky at Ravensbourne to have a brand new campus (building finished summer 2010). The building is great for sustainability:

  • It is very insulated, so that we don’t heat the street in the winter!
  • All lights are turned on by motion sensors and turn off automatically. This is not only good for the environment but also for the lazy student!
  • The whole building is controlled by a Building Management System (BMS). This fancy bit of kit controls all the lights, electricity, heating and pretty much everything in the building. At Ravensbourne, we are always tweaking the settings on the BMS so that we use as little resources as possible (but don’t leave students freezing!)

Cycling

Cycling is a great alternative to other methods of transport and Ravensbourne really is in the perfect location for this healthy and sustainable form of travel. There are lots of cycle routes near our campus; in fact Sustrans route one runs right past us! It is very simple to cycle from south of the river, there are cycle routes from Greenwich, Charlton, Deptford and Woolwich. If you live further away you can bring your bike on the train to Charlton and from there is only a 10 minute cycle to campus. There are hoops to lock your bike to right outside campus main door and because the peninsular has 24 hour security bike theft is low compared to London averages - still make sure you bring a good lock though; the Union recommends a lock with Solid Silver rating for bikes up to the value of £600.

For more information on cycle routes you should contact RSU or visit the Sustrans Website

Walking

For walking, the route from Charlton (which runs next to the cycle path along the river) is particularly scenic and you will often bump into other friendly walkers, joggers and cyclists. When on lunch break you can also walk around to the top of the peninsular where you will find a few benches and grassy spots overlooking the river and Canary Wharf.

If you wish to find out more about any of the routes to/from or near campus, Transport for London website provides maps online or you can contact RSU.

Recycling

At Ravensbourne we are very fond of recycling, and have recycling bins pretty much everywhere. This ties in with our paper use reduction policies which aims to use laptops and websites as an alternative to mass printing and photocopying.

Green events

To raise awareness about sustainability the Students’ Union puts on a number of events over the year. Last year we hosted a great question and debate show featuring leading expects and topics such as “How do you make a TV studio green?”. This year we have already ran a successful brewery tour with a sustainable twist!

Our peninsular

Ravensbourne is right next to The O2 arena on the tip on Greenwich Peninsular, this is fantastic! The river Thames is all around us (literally) and has been steadily cleaned up by the authorities over the past years - it is now the cleanest metropolitan river in Europe! You can read about this fact and find out about lots more Thames trivia by going for a stroll around the river near our campus (there are lots of interesting signs and plenty of spots to laze in the sun).