On a chilly Wednesday afternoon, a group of colleagues from across Estates and the School of Life Sciences visited our waste contractor Grundon’s Energy from Waste (EfW) site and Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) at nearby Colnbrook.
The visit was for a number of reasons - to inspect the sites and ensure that the agreed service is being delivered, to learn more about what happens to our waste and, crucially, to explore what more we can do to reduce the overall amount of waste we produce on campus.
Royal Holloway already has a zero-waste-to-landfill contract in place. This means that, instead of being buried underground at landfill sites, any waste that cannot otherwise be reused or recycled is incinerated, with the resultant heat being used to make steam, which, in turn, is used to generate electricity. We were told during our visit that the electricity generated from the site is enough to power the whole of Slough!
However, whilst it’s good that we are avoiding sending our waste to landfill, our main aim is, and must continue to be, to reduce the overall amount of waste and recycling we produce.
Setting ambitious targets and embedding the waste hierarchy (prevent > reuse > recycle > recover > dispose) across everything we do will help us achieve this, and we’re currently working to improve awareness and make this easier for colleagues and students.
