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Green Mary Sustainability Fund: 2021/22

Find out more about the student and staff projects supported by the Green Mary Sustainability Fund in 2021/22.

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About the fund 

The Green Mary Sustainability Fund was launched as one of the outcomes of our Sustainability Week 2021.  This fund aims to support staff and student-led environmental sustainability initiatives at the university in working towards a sustainable future.

A total of £3,000 was available during the 2021/22 academic year application window which closed on 22 February 2022. 

Funded projects

You can see a full list of funded projects below: 

  1. Alicia Ellison (Blizard Institute) - Recycling of Disposable Gloves in the Blizard Institute Laboratories 
     
    This project will seek to combat single use plastic reliance in laboratories by introducing a recycling scheme for disposable gloves at the Blizard Institute in partnership with TerraCycle, a company pioneering recycling ‘difficult’ waste.  
     
     
  2. Maizie Gordon (School of Geography) - Regrowing Mile End Bird Population 
     
     This project seeks to support the local bird population in Mile End through creating new specialised habitats to replace those lost to increased urbanisation.  
     
     
  3. Amelia Jones (Sustain@BL Society & School of Medicine and Dentistry) - Planetary Health Panel 
     
    Sustain@BL are hosting a planetary health panel with expert guest speakers on the intersections between the climate crisis and health both in affecting people's health and contributing to the problem through issues such as energy use. The event will increase awareness about the climate crisis in health professionals, as well as helping different groups to learn about each other, and work together. 
     
     
  4. Dr Joelle Booth, Dr Zahra Shehabi and Dr Bethany Revert (School of Medicine and Dentistry) - NHS Sustainability Day

    As part of the NHS Sustainability Day in June, the fund will support public engagement activities to showcase how the healthcare sector is embedding sustainability as well as interactive student-led activities such as an interactive waste management game and a quiz focused on lifestyle adjustments in order to minimise carbon impact.  


  5. Roxanne Travers (School of Politics and International Relations) - FFF Swap-not-Shop Events 

    FFF will be organising Swap-not-Shop events, encouraging students and staff to bring in their old clothes and swap them out for new ones. As well as the swap, embroidery, mending and crochet workshops will teach attendees sustainable fashion skills.


  6. Dr Zita Patai (School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences) - Staff Wellbeing Gardening Staff within SBBS will be organise fortnightly social gardening sessions to support staff wellbeing and local biodiversity, around the themes of houseplant sharing, herb and flower gardening in the campus allotments and creating birdhouses and feeders. 


  7. Dr Giovanni Santagiuliana, Bijoy Das and Aaron Soul (School of Engineering and Materials Science) - Sustainable Bicycle Tubes Project 

    The Sustainable Bicycle Tubes project aims at developing a bio-based material for bicycle inner tubes that are puncture-free and can be recycled at the end of life.  Common bike tubes are made of synthetic butyl rubber obtained from crude oil. The material itself is recyclable, but the process is long and must be carried out in Eastern countries to be cost effective. Therefore, a considerable amount of tubes is disposed of at landfill. This problem highlights the need for a material that can be recycled locally at low-cost. 

    In this project, researchers in SEMS will be studying the recyclability of a new sustainable, bio-based material via several chopping/compounding/moulding cycles and assessing potential degradation that may occur during the recycling process. Moreover, they will be designing a new tube structure that allows to keep riding even when a puncture occurs and distributing the prototypes on campus.
     

For further information about this fund and the application process contact sustainability@qmul.ac.uk 

 

 

 

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