Recycling and waste

The University has a legal requirement to pre-treat the waste it produces i.e. separating out all possible recyclable materials.

During the 2021-2022 academic year, the University produced over 350 tonnes of waste from its halls of residence, academic buildings, catering outlets and grounds, and recycled an estimated 43% through segregation of food waste, paper, card, plastic bottles, cans and glass (nb, this figure is likely to be an overestimation because the food waste and glass bins are an average weight per bin). This waste could have been minimised by following the waste hierarchy, which would have reduced both the cost to the University and the impact on the environment.

The waste hierarchy ranks waste management options according to what is best for the environment:

• Prevent producing waste in the first place
• Re-use (cleaning, repairing, refurbishing)
• Recycle what’s possible
• Recovery to produce energy and/or materials
• Disposal as a last resort

Collections

Initiatives

Bring your own mug when purchasing a drink

Pack for Good at the end of term:

What to donate:

• Clothes, shoes and accessories
• Books, CDs, DVDs and games
• NO dirty or broken items, pillows or duvets, knives, hangars, bikes and helmets

How:

• Simply bag up your unwanted things

Where:

• Drop the bags off in the red collection banks in the Car Parks at Aigburth Park, Creative Campus (by Hopkins Hall), and at Hope Park (in the FML car park by Green Lane Building and in the HCA car park by Hope Park Sports)

When:

• Whenever you fill your bags. The red collection banks are available now.
• Red British Heart Foundation red collection banks have been placed around campus

The University produces a number of waste streams, which are collected and recycled. It is important to place the correct items in the right bin, as any contamination (the wrong thing in the wrong bin) will result in it all being treated as general waste.

We currently recycle:

Liverpool Hope University has introduced centralised recycling facilities across the campuses in teaching areas, offices and circulation spaces, so that staff and students are never too far away from a recycling station. There are four separate receptacles for recycling paper (Blue lid), plastic bottles (Yellow lid) and food and drinks cans (Red lid). Waste that cannot be recycled (including takeaway cups and food wrappers) is collected separately at the same station (Black lid). Cardboard is also collected, but it must be flattened and left by the recycling stations before it is collected.

Think - Reduce – Reuse – Recycle. The best way to reduce the amount of waste is not to create it in the first place:

• Do you need to purchase the item?
• Can goods be supplied with less packaging?
• When purchasing new items, look for durable items that are built to last
• Make proper use of the University’s recycling bins

Did you know? During the 2014-2015 academic year, the University put 148 tonnes of recyclables into the general waste at an additional cost of £9,000.

Items can either be recycled into the same product or into new materials. This conserves our precious resources and saves energy.

Take proactive measures to reduce the number of handouts taken to meetings by emailing hand-outs, power-point presentations, agendas, previous minutes and papers to meeting attendees, or by using the projector facilities.

Think before you print:

• Can you scan and email documents rather than printing and posting?
• Use track changes, instead of printing and making notes
• Do you really need to print out that email?
• Only print the relevant pages
• Print double sided (typically reduces paper consumption by around 40%)
• Don’t print in colour, unless absolutely necessary

Use glass and crockery in meetings instead of plastic or paper alternatives.

Refill a water bottle instead of buying a new bottle or using plastic cup every time - water stations are available for use in Fresh Hope, LTC Foyer, EDEN cafe, Chapters and Hope Park Sports Foyer.

Collect all paper that has been printed on one side and re-use it for scrap paper.

Use old envelopes for sending internal mail.

Cancel junk mail and unwanted publications to reduce the amount of waste that has to be thrown away.

Register with the Mail Preference Service to reduce your junk mail.

Use rechargeable batteries rather than disposable ones.

• We sent zero waste to landfill: 100% was either reused, recycled or used for Energy From Waste

• The University's old cooking oil is collected by Olleco for conversion into bio-fuel for their vehicles

• In 2018-2019 (October to July), our End of Year Pack for Good event in the student halls of residence collected 444 bags of unwanted items (including kitchen items, clothing, and stationery), which generated around £6,216 for the British Heart Foundation. The Pack for Good Campaign is run across Merseyside and includes the three Universities, private accommodation and local authorities. In 2018, nearly £48,000 was raised and saved the weight of 4.5 elephants from going to waste.  

• The students collected over 20 boxes of kitchen items which were donated to the local asylum seekers charity

• In partnership with our library, Better World Books reused or recycled 4.3 tonnes of books

• The Salvation Army received 162 pairs of curtains and 90 desktop fridges following the refurbishment of student accommodation.  

• Using recycled materials in the manufacturing process uses considerably less energy and produces less emissions than that required for producing new materials from raw materials (www.wrap.org.uk):
  • Two glass bottles = enough energy to boil enough water for five cups of tea
  • One aluminium can = enough energy to power a TV set for 3 hours
  • One plastic bottle = enough energy to power a 60W light bulb for six hours

• Each year, in the UK, we throw away £12.5 billion worth of good food, costing the average family almost £60 per month. If we stopped wasting food, we could avoid 17 million tonnes of CO­₂ being emitted each year, the same as taking 1 in 4 cars off the road (www.lovefoodhatewaste.com).

• UK households have an average of £4,000 worth of clothes, but a third of those haven’t been worn in the last year, and we throw more than 30% of our clothing in the bin. All of our clothing can either be re-used or recycled.
  • If no longer used, pass them on.
  • Donate them to the collection bins which are around campus.
  • Recycle them.

• Glass, steel and aluminium cans can be endlessly recycled with no loss in quality (www.wrap.org)

• Each year in the UK we use 10.4 million tonnes of paper and cardboard and it takes up to 40,000L of water to make every tonne

• It takes 7 days for a recycled newspaper to come back as newspaper again

• You can now recycle your soft contact lenses and blister packs via Terracycle (in partnership with Acuvue) at participating Boots and Independent Opticians.

• Medicine blister packs (empty) can now be recycled at participating Superdrug stores and independent chemists

• The Body Shop and L'Occitane are now collecting any brand of clean, empty cosmetics and beauty packaging for recycling 

• You can now recycle your inhalers at participating chemists via GSK.