Bournemouth University Sustainability Annual Report 2018-2019
Responsible procurement Our Sustainable Procurement Policy requires all purchases made at the university to consider social and environmental factors within their tendering process. Such factors include transport, packaging and impacts on the local community and economy. For any purchases over £25,000, a Life Cycle Analysis is conducted which assesses the cradle-to-grave impact of the product, from resource extraction to disposal. The results are then used to identify the most significant impacts to ensure the product can be as sustainable as possible.
Since 2014/2015, we have reduced our A4 paper orders by over one third
Bournemouth
Excluding our major build projects, a quarter of our total supplier spend this year was spent within 50 miles of the university.
Ben Thomas Sustainable Design & Engineering Faculty of Science & Technology
“We have continued to closely integrate sustainable design principles into our D&E courses. This has included more content in the first year to raise awareness of the impacts of products when they become waste, and some more detailed work in Masters units, where we dismantle a range of household products to look at their manufacturing, and then measure the environmental impact of the product over its whole life cycle. Students then redesign the product to reduce its impact and, where possible,
try to create a closed loop ‘cradle-to-cradle’ solution. Finally, at the end of the unit the plastics from the household products are recycled back into prototyping sheets using the Innovation Centre recycling facilities.”
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