Library and Cultural Services Sustainable Essex Gold Award

Library and Cultural Services have achieved the Gold Sustainable Essex Award for the fourth year in a row! 

Our sustainability team is made up of members from across the Library and the Arts and have been working hard to increase our sustainability efforts and raise awareness. 

Here are some of the things we did this year:

Displays and Events

We celebrated Climate Action Day, Plastic Free July, Earth Day and the UN SDG campaign where we provided students and other Library users with resources to help them engage actively in sustainability and provide opportunities to find out more through displays and engagement activities, including the Sustainability Awareness Week Reading List.

The Sustainability Awareness Week reading list covers a variety of themes, including: climate fiction, climate and sustainability TV series and documentaries, and textbooks for users to consume at their leisure, or for research purposes.

Fuel Theatre’s Protest! came to the Lakeside Theatre, a play which explored themes such as prejudice, climate change and finding the power of your voice to make a difference. Written by Hannah Lavery, award winning poet, playwright and performer and Edinburgh Makar (or city poet), Protest explores the climate emergency, racism and sexism through the voices of three young girls.

Reducing plastic use

We took part in the Big Plastic Count to raise awareness of plastic usage and encourage teams and library users to reduce their plastic use.

Through the Library staff notice board, we were able to communicate best practice and ways to reduce plastic use in work practices as well as at home.

A success of our aim to reduce plastic use is that the Lakeside Theatre have recently changed to using paper cups which we estimate will save an average of 243 plastic cups a month!

Making more sustainable choices

Our staff have been getting inspiration from our vegan recipe board and posting their vegan lunch choices, although some lunch choices have been less inspiring including ‘A boring salad’ and ‘crisps’. More recipes perhaps needed…

We also held a sustainable bake-off where staff were challenged to use Fairtrade and vegan ingredients. Not only did we get to eat lots of cake, but we also raised £73 for Hopefield Animal Sanctuary.

Sustainability Library Guide

This year we launched a Sustainability Library Guide to help users find resources relating to sustainability for teaching and learning.

Working closely with Essex’s Sustainability Team and the Sustainability Engagement Manager, Michel Mason, we created a space on the Library Services website which communicates both the importance of sustainability and the library’s sustainability resources for use in research, learning and teaching.

The webpages were inspired by the Library’s Decolonising the Library Guide which is used to promote important resources in the wider society and is separate from the usual subject guides the library produces based upon the subjects studied at Essex.

The Sustainability Library Guide aims to highlight and curate useful Library and open access resources relating to sustainability. We hope to provide easy access to these in one place, and to include resources of all types: books, films, databases, digital and physical archives, art collections and websites, etc.

The guide is intended to provide a starting point for academics who want to embed sustainability into their teaching and reading lists and for students and researchers wanting to incorporate sustainability into their studies and research. Students and staff can additionally use the guide as a way to discover relevant reading materials to develop their knowledge.

Sustainable Essex Gold Award

This year Library and Cultural Services were awarded gold primarily due to our engagement activities targeting both staff and students.

We implemented a number of initiatives on all three campuses to increase staff and student awareness of sustainability including displays, bake sales, the Sustainability Library Guide, theatre productions etc.

As a library, we are ideally placed to disseminate information on important topics and the cultural services aspect of our service allows us to do this in a way that effectively engages users.

Library and Cultural Services Sustainability Team members Krysta Lynch, Marcus Goulding and Beth Burnett went along to the Sustainable Essex Awards on 29 May to represent the section and collect our award!

Thank you to everyone who made this possible and thank you to everyone for getting involved with our sustainability engagement programme.

Have you got some ideas for other things we could do at any of our three libraries, art gallery or theatre to promote sustainability? Get in touch!