As Scotland looks forward to hosting the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in November, Scottish colleges have come together to support a new and ground-breaking statement of commitment on the Climate Emergency.
The ‘Scottish Colleges’ Statement of Commitment on the Climate Emergency’, which has been produced by CDN’s college Climate Emergency Expert Group, in partnership with Colleges Scotland and Energy Skills Partnership (ESP), highlights how college staff and students are working together to achieve a more sustainable future for Scotland.
The statement of commitment establishes 10 key actions, which colleges have committed to delivering, with the aim of speeding up efforts to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions.
10 Key Actions
Support Scotland’s efforts to achieve net-zero climate emissions by 2045 or earlier if possible, with Scotland’s colleges aiming to achieve net-zero by 2040 or earlier.
Embed environmental sustainability in our institutional strategies and set measurable targets.Address the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in our strategies.
Address the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in our strategies.
Share best practice within and beyond the college/ university sector.
Deploy our expertise and experience to combat climate change.
Contribute to public debate on climate change and use the power of our example to encourage others.
Work with Scottish industry, employers, public sector bodies and others to improve working practices and find practical solutions to climate change and to make our planet safe for future generations.
Encourage, where appropriate, colleges to adopt the UK HE/ FE Climate Commission’s ‘Climate Action Roadmap for FE Colleges.’
Each college will publish action plans to address on-campus and supply chain emissions, setting out what steps they will take over a five-year horizon and beyond where possible, and what they aim to achieve to address the climate emergency.
Educate staff, students, employers and communities on the impact their daily lives and working practices have on the environment/ climate. While working with our partners, local employers and communities to ensure everyone is aware of their personal responsibility to our planet.
The UK’s leading garden centre retailer, Dobbies Garden Centres, demonstrates its support for the Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) National Gardening Week (26 April – 2 May) with the launch of new sustainable products in the Edinburgh store and the start of its #sustainabledobbies campaign.
Market leaders in the garden centre sector, Dobbies is committed to educating about the importance of soil health and delivering environmentally-friendly practices and products, and sustainable solutions.
Dobbies supports the RHS’s aim to enrich lives through plants and make the UK a greener place. This year, the RHS is encouraging everyone to get their ‘dose of Vitamin G’ by taking a few minutes each day to connect with nature. Dobbies will share dedicated National Gardening Week content focused on #sustainabledobbies which will build and develop throughout 2021 both online and instore.
A key part of Dobbies’ sustainability pledge is to reduce the use of peat, plastics and pesticides in its product range. The team are on track with the commitment made in 2020 to be 90% peat free in 2021 and 100% peat free in 2022. The retailer has also worked with nursery suppliers to produce a roadmap for an annual reduction in peat use.
Dobbies is launching a number of new sustainable products in the Edinburgh store and online. Landing in store this week are biochar products from Carbon Gold – Carbon Gold Biochar Fertiliser and Biochar Soil Improver – with Dobbies being the first leading garden centre to stock these products.
Carbon Gold’s biochar products are 100% peat and chemical-free, FSC Certified and Soil Association organic approved, and are used by professionals the world over, including conventional and organic crop growers, tree care specialists and even elite sports greenkeepers.
Biochar is so high in carbon that adding it to soil permanently sequesters CO2 from the atmosphere. In fact, biochar acts like natural magic in the garden, with significant and permanent benefits proven to boost the health and vitality of plants.
A garden centre first, in the next month Dobbies will launch compost bag recycling in store, in partnership with Evergreen. This will initially launch in 10 stores, with further roll out planned in 2021. New pot recycling stations will also be installed, building on the success of the pot return scheme, as well as a commitment to increasing recyclable plant pots and single use plastics.
As part of #sustaintabledobbies, there is additional focus on the safer range of pest control products, to reduce the impact on beneficial garden insects and wildlife. The retailer does not stock weedkillers that contain glyphosate or slug killers that contain metaldehyde, and rodenticides have been delisted.
Graeme Jenkins, CEO of Dobbies, said: “At Dobbies we pride ourselves on providing the best gardening products, services and advice, and it’s also our responsibility to care for our environment.
“Sustainable practices have been a core focus for some time and we are pleased to support National Gardening Week with #sustainabledobbies.
“It’s our duty to raise awareness and promote better sustainability practices among our suppliers, team members and customers, and we look forward to sharing news of new products and services in our Edinburgh store over the course of 2021.
“As well as reducing our use of peat, plastics and pesticides and providing our customers with recycling opportunities, we are also proud supporters of Terra Carta from HRH The Prince of Wales’ Sustainable Market Initiative – helping make the UK a greener place.”
Mike Hartshorn, MD of Carbon Gold, said: “After seeing a massive boom in retail sales last year, we’re absolutely thrilled to have our biochar products on shelves at Dobbies’ Edinburgh store in time for Spring 2021.
“Gardeners, home growers and allotmenteers have always wanted their plots of outdoor space to be healthy, vibrant and disease and pest free, but these days making sure they’re also environmentally friendly is rising up everyone’s lists of priorities.
“Our biochar products, which have always been the professionals’ best kept secret, are the perfect replacement for unsustainable peat-based products because they really work and they’re actually good for the environment. It is the gardening product of the future!”
For National Gardening Week, Dobbies has released a new podcast episode focused on sustainable gardening. Horticulture Director, Marcus Eyles, joins host Louise Midgely to discuss Dobbies’ sustainable aims and new product launches, as well as practical advice on how gardeners can care for the environment at home.
For keen gardeners in Edinburgh there are also two new FREE virtual events, which will support the #sustainabledobbies focus: https://www.dobbies.com/events
· 8 May – Time to Colour Your Garden
· 15 May – Roses – The UK’s Favourite Flower
Follow and support Dobbies sustainability campaign using the hashtag #sustainabledobbies
The UK’s testing capacity for Covid-19 may be helping to avert a further rise in case numbers – but the waste produced means a disposal disaster is looming.
According to Government figures, the UK is now testing over 580,000 people per day – or over 4 million people per week – for the Covid-19 virus which is circulating amongst the population.
This number includes tests taken at Covid testing centres, door-to-door tests, and the quicker lateral flow tests being used in workplaces and schools – but does not include antibody tests, which check if a person has had the virus previously, so the true number of daily test kits used is likely to be much higher.
Rubbish removal experts Divert.co.uk have raised the alarm over the sheer volume of testing kits being used daily and concerns of the accuracy as low as 57.5% making this a very dangerous problem. There is a mounting problem for testing centres and facilities: what to do with hundreds of thousands of used tests daily?
As the Covid-19 testing process involves either nasal or throat swabs (or, for antibody testing, blood samples) the kits must then be disposed of as clinical waste, in incinerators. In the past, individual hospitals often had their own incinerators to dispose of medical waste, but this idea was short-lived as the resulting pollution was a concern, and private contractors have handled the waste since the 1990s.
But these contractors are now raising the alarm that their incinerators are at full capacity, and have been for a while, with medical waste quite literally piling up, as a result, the instantly-recognizable yellow medical waste bins overflowing. In turn, this has angered those in the industry who say they have been warning the government ‘for years’ about the need for increased capacity.
NHS chiefs admitted in 2018 that there was a national capacity issue amid growing backlogs of medical waste and clinical waste management firms being forced to store waste above their permitted allowance as a result. Despite this, waste management firms are once again warning of mounting problems as Covid-19 testing places unexpected stress on the system.
Firms, fearful of repercussions like those seen by waste management businesses who were penalised during the 2018 crisis, are turning away contracts for Covid-19 test centre waste, leading many to call the issue a public health ‘emergency’.
Spokesperson Mark Hall of Divert.co.uk said:“It’s important to note that, of course, the huge scale of Covid-19 testing in the United Kingdom is a good thing – it allows us to track the spread of the virus, which is enormously important in tackling the pandemic and allowing us to return to pre-Covid life.
“However, the sheer number of testing kits being processed each day without adequate disposal capacity to handle the waste generated, combined with the accuracy of some lateral flow tests being as low as 57.5% makes it a serious cause for concern, and we hope it will spark further conversations in the medical manufacturing industry about the way in which we approach the issue of medical waste.
“Hundreds of thousands of pieces of single-use plastic are disposed of daily by the medical industry, from syringes to gloves to the Covid test kits, and many of these seem unavoidable.”
Experts in the field such as Tony Capon, director of the Monash Sustainable Development Institute – speaking to the BBC – are clear that there are long term steps that could be taken to reduce unnecessary medical waste.
He said: “When I was beginning my medical career, it was standard practice for things to be cleaned and autoclaved. Medical equipment was routinely cleaned up, sterilised and reused.”
Others note that changes in practices – such as encouraging handwashing rather than glove use, where appropriate – could help decrease excessive waste.
Mark Hall continues:“We’d like there to be a greater focus on ensuring sustainability in the healthcare field overall. Firstly, by promoting a more sustainably-minded culture where medical workers actively choose to take safe steps to reduce waste, and secondly by minimising waste in the design and manufacturing of single-use items.
“Creating items which can be safely sterilised and re-used could, over time, lead to huge shifts in how we tackle medical waste as a problem – and it is, in its current format, undeniably becoming a problem.”
– Morrisons to work with brands to reduce plastic in products and packaging –
– Supermarket’s packaging and technical teams on hand to offer support –
Morrisons has asked its branded suppliers to help fight the war on plastic, as part of its commitment to reduce the amount of the material in its stores and supply chain operations.
The supermarket made the appeal at its annual supplier conference, to which 1,600 suppliers were invited.
Morrisons is asking its branded suppliers to reduce plastic in both product packaging and on the shelf display packaging, as well as in the materials in which these products are transported to stores.
It is hoped that this will remove thousands of tonnes of plastic from the supermarket’s shelves a year – and make it easier for customers to reduce the amount of plastic they are purchasing.
Advice and guidance will be offered by Morrisons technical teams to help brands to reduce their plastic packaging. As the supermarket is ‘vertically integrated’ – and manufactures more than half of the fresh food it sells – it is in a unique position to be able to offer support to the industry.
Andy Atkinson, Group Commercial Director at Morrisons said: “As the UK’s biggest fresh food maker we are committed to helping our customers live their life with less plastic. So we are asking our branded suppliers to join with us in reducing our plastic footprint as this is a priority for our customers.”
Morrisons has committed to a 50% reduction across its own brand primary plastic packaging by 2025. Initiatives introduced over the last 12 months will remove 9,000 tonnes of unnecessary or problematic plastic each year. Eighty three per cent of its own-brand plastic packaging is now able to be recycled.
In 2019 Morrisons was voted the most environmentally responsible company in the UK for its work on plastics reduction at the Responsible Business Awards, run by HRH The Prince of Wales’ Business in the Community Network. Greenpeace has also repeatedly ranked Morrisons second in the supermarket industry for its plastic reduction achievements.
Morrisons work on plastic reduction sits alongside other sustainability commitments made by the supermarket including net zero emissions by 2040, a zero-deforestation plan and a 50% reduction in operational food waste by 2030.
For more details on Morrisons sustainability commitments visit:
Scottish Transport Secretary Michael Matheson MSP will give the keynote address at an event showcasing electric vehicles – including two and three-wheelers, the Car of the Year and an electric double decker bus.
“Fresh thinking is turning Edinburgh into a Sustainable Food City”
Bustling, vibrant market gardens in all four corners of the Capital are helping fuel and nourish our population – especially our children and older people – with perfectly fresh, locally grown seasonal produce (writes the city council’s Sustainability Champion, Forth Cllr George Gordon).Continue reading Food for Thought from Edinburgh’s Sustainabilty Champion
Businesses in Edinburgh are being urged to act now to embrace the economic opportunity of sustainability by the VIBES – Scottish Environment Business Awards.The leading environmental awards underlined the need for urgent action to address the environmental challenges currently faced as well as highlighting the potential business benefits which this can deliver.Continue reading Good VIBES for Edinburgh businesses
It’s that most versatile of foodstuffs. traditionally enjoyed scrambled, poached, boiled or fried. But eggs could soon be appearing on tables in a way never seen before thanks to the work of an Edinburgh Napier student.Continue reading Napier’s Martina has a cracking idea!
The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has launched a new £8million annual investment programme to help organisations and partnerships build their resilience. Resilient Heritage grants between £3,000 and £250,000 will fund a range of tailored activity specifically designed to help organisations improve the way they manage heritage for the long term.
