On Tuesday 9th July, the Green Team were awarded the Green Impact Gold Award at the Environmental Sustainability End of Year Showcase at Lady Margaret Hall College (LMH). Congratulations to the Green Team on their achievement and a huge thank you for their hard work this year to ensure our department is a leader in sustainability.
 

Green Impact is a programme that provides a toolkit of effective actions we can take to improve sustainability. The toolkit is tailored to support the University’s Environmental Sustainability Strategy with headline targets of net zero carbon and biodiversity net gain by 2035. Each action that a team completes counts towards achieving a Bronze, Silver or Gold environmental accreditation from Green Impact. Teams that have completed Gold twice can then apply for Beyond Gold.

The Statistics Green Team were aiming for Silver this year. However, with hard work the team have scored enough points for Gold, subject to an audit, which took place on 12th June.

Over the course of the 2023 – 2024 Academic Year, the Green Team have taken multiple actions throughout the department towards sustainability. The majority of these qualified to be included in the Green Impact Award submission.

What did the submission include?

The submission included a project on sustainable catering, where we hope to improve how we cater our events. This included:

• auditing our crockery and cutlery to ensure we have enough for events.
• researching new catering suppliers.
• collecting data on suppliers, including their environmental sustainability practices and ethical practices.
• creating a guide on sustainable catering for the department.
   

Here is a sample of what else the Green Team has done this year.

• Introduced more plants around the department, both inside and out. We hope that you appreciate the greenery, particularly in the Social Area and the car park.
• Held a plant swap and information session.
• Two members of the team attended a Bioblitz at Worcester College where they spent an hour taking photos of the flora and fauna and uploading to the iNaturalist app.
• Conducted a survey on travel habits of members of the Department.
• The Inaugural Green Lecture was held this April, where we had a thought-provoking and interesting talk by Dr Loïc Lannelongue.

If you are interested in joining the Statistics Green Team next year or have any ideas, please e-mail greenteam@stats.ox.ac.uk.