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STARTING POINT
28
08
thank you
headline achievements
31
31
30
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activities grid
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outcomes
project legacy
RGU:Union-GoGreen Revolve Project Robert Gordon University Student Association CCF-5046 Project Contact: Michele Collie, General Manager Robert Gordon University Student Association, University Street, Garthdee Campus, Aberdeen AB10 7GE
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Email: m.collie@rgu.ac.uk Tel: 01224 262292 Website: www.rguunion.co.uk
finance
final report
2017-18
starting point rgu:union RGU Student Association is an unincorporated not-for-profit organisation with charitable status, and as an autonomous part of the Robert Gordon University (RGU) has existed even before RGU received full University status in 1992. RGU has a current combined student population of over 17000 students. RGU Student Association, often known as the “RGU:Union�, was founded on the keystone of providing its members, the students, with services that support their experience at University, including welfare, representation, extra-curricular activities, societies, sports clubs, and independent advice. The Union is run for students by students with the wellbeing of its membership central to its planning. This organisation strongly believes that the welfare and happiness of its members reflects directly on their academic performance, just as their performance and behaviour directly reflects on RGU Student Association and the University Community at large.
revolve
projections outcomes 1 & 2 outcome 1: waste-clothing & textiles
outcome 2: waste-household swapshop
Reduce Carbon emissions by 49.1t CO2e through reducing clothing purchases and textiles going to landfill
Reduce Carbon emissions by 3.99t CO2e due to a reduction in household items being manufactured and old items going to landfill
Tonnes of items destined for landfill that could easily be put to better use are seen on the streets of Aberdeen each June. Whilst some items undoubtedly make it to local charity shops there is still a need for a service that is easily accessible, practical and efficient to use. With this in mind we instigated a collections service at handy drop-off points around campus, and organised a clear-out of some of the RGU operated Halls of Residence.
RGU Union have enjoyed great success in delivering sustainability projects over a number of years, helping to create a sustainable campus and community, and this was no different with our latest project, Revolve.
RGU hosts a renowned Fashion & Textile Design course, and previous RGU Union projects have included popular fashion upcycle workshops, highlighting the possibilities for pre-loved clothing. We aimed to take this to the next level, opening up a boutique outlet with surplus items collected from our community, modelled and displayed in a way to remove the stigma surrounding second hand clothing, with additional workshops demonstrating simple repair and repurpose techniques.
Our community of students is highly transient, and with thousands of students descending on Aberdeen each year - often only for 8 months - this leads to a major problem of perfectly usable household materials being discarded at the end of the academic year. With student finances as tight as ever, we saw a remarkable opportunity to have a positive impact on a number of fronts: -Reduce items going to landfill -Reduce the need for new items to be manufactured -Provide affordable, useable items for our community.
WORKSWAPFREE-
We identified three key areas in which we would operate: -Clothing -Household Goods -Bicycles
SHOP
It was our aim to promote and develop a more circular economy within our community, encouraging individuals to reflect on their current consumption habits, and take action to reduce their individual carbon footprint whilst helping this new economic model progress from its foundation stage.
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RGU: GOGREEn
FINAL REPORT 2017/18
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projections outcomes 5 & 6
outcome 3: waste-bike workshop
outcome 4: travel-bike workshop
Save 2.4t CO2e by recycling bikes that would normally go to landfill, reducing the need for new ones to be manufactured
Reduce 7.2t CO2e by providing more sustainable travel options
Cycling rates are on the up, with initial analysis showing a 5% increase compared to previous years. We are looking to further develop this growth through improvements to facilities and infrastructure so that this ongoing success does not falter. Having previously run well-attended “Dr Bike� maintenance sessions alongside Cycling Scotland and piloted a cycling maintenance workshop space we know there is a demand, and employing a dedicated member of staff to oversee and run a kitted out workshop space would allow us to provide a permanent space reinvigorating bikes previously destined for the scrap heap.
Demand for our hire bikes is increasing year on year, and we are passionate about facilitating as many sustainable journeys to and from campus as possible. Over the length of the project, we aim to add an additional 50 bikes to our hire fleet that are sourced through sustainable methods, providing them to staff and students as an alternative to carbon intensive transport options such as buses and cars. These bikes will be revived and serviced in conjunction with our bike workshop, and alongside the newly founded LivEco student sustainability group.
outcome 5: low carbon food options
community outcome 1: community knowledge
Reduce CO2e emissions by 3.3t by offering low-carbon food options
We also wanted to reach out to our wider community to evangelise about the benefits of a lower-carbon lifestyle, offering practical learning experiences and opportunities for discussion and debate. This is a key element of our project, as we want people to have the skills to participate in the circular economy, and to reconsider the value that they place on items, repairing, repurposing and reusing rather than what has become the standard model of purchasing, consuming, disposing.
Our VegBag scheme has enjoyed substantial popularity recently with the closed community of staff and students at the Robert Gordon University campus, filling a gap in the Aberdeen market which lacks a permanent outlet for local, sustainable and organic produce.Through the development of a cargo-cycle distribution method in combination with our established electric vehicle wholesale collection method, we will reduce the carbon emissions associated with the delivery of the food even further, widening the reach to the 1,700 students in city centre halls, with additional savings from the use of re-usable packaging throughout the process.
WORKSWAPFREE-
Alongside a series of workshops at our re-use spaces on campus, we partnered with another local charity, StreetSport, to attend 25 of their evening sessions around Aberdeen, engaging with a younger audience to enthuse them about the benefits of active travel and bike maintenance.
SHOP
projections outcomes 3 & 4
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FINAL REPORT 2017/18
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headline achievements
262
regular drop-in sessions at kaim co-op & bike pad
45
training sessions teaching bike maintenance, textiles re-use, & repair skills
939
people attended our events, workshops & training sessions
31
volunteers involved directly in the revolve project
33
open days, stalls, & visits to halls
956
volunteering hours logged on the revolve project
15
events attended arranged by partner organisations
110
pupils engaged with at local schools
27
people achieved formal qualifications
61
kilos of food donated to cfine
activities grid project in numbers
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RGU: GOGREEn
FINAL REPORT 2017/18
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activities grid
Kaim’s Design Story
open sessions & events at kaim co-op
featured workshops The Kaim Co-op is RGU GoGreen’s new creative and social hub where you can donate, swap and take clothes and household goods as well as learn new repair and repurposing skills. Since the 12th of October the co-op has held over 13 workshops in order to give students the skills to be able to choose to repair their clothes, repurpose their used goods, and live a more creatively sustainable lifestyle. These workshops included the following featured sessions:
repurposing nurses uniforms Our dedicated Kaimer and Nursing student Azeezat Ogunbadejo taught sewing skills to participants in order to repurpose uniforms donated by the nursing course at RGU. These were then donated to the Siddiqah Foundation in Nigeria, a registered non-governmental organisation created to help struggling families in society through health advocacy, empowerment and support programmes.
craftivism This workshop was the last in a series coordinated by our staff at GoGreen and was used to inform participants on how craft can be used as subtle yet effective, form of protest.
Felting Artist Beatrice Charnley donated her time and talents to teach participants how to create beautiful pieces of art from felt. Beatrice has been felting for a number of years, alongside her
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studies at Gray’s School of Art, and has become quite proficient in both wet and dry felting methods.
clothing repair In this workshop participants were taught repair techniques, demonstrating the potential long life span of clothing, with just a few basic skills. Participants learned darning, felting, mending, patching, and hand-sewing.
Make your own bowtie Our Eco Co-ordinator Layla Sawford ran a bowtie making workshop using donated textiles, as well as preferred materials brought in by participants. This workshop additionally taught basic sewing skills, allowing participants to make bows for both ties and hair.
cardboard home decor Our fantastic volunteer Irina Cristina Bogdan ran a creative reuse workshop in order to teach participants to make wool-knit pictures using cardboard as a base.
Other workshops halloween crafts knit & natter Weaving: reusing old t-shirts paper beads
Pop-up Shops
The intention to work creatively and collectively to imagine new ways for students to coexist and furnish their lives began with a call out to designers to come forward and help reimagine the space that is now Kaim Co-operative. After reviewing a number of innovative applications we eventually chose the designs by Gray’s Graduate in Residence Ruth Kirby Organ. Ruth brought a playful and light aesthetic to the co-op space, transforming the grey office-like rooms into a vibrant hub. Ruth managed to come up with a number of beskpoke designs under the influence of many student groups who use Kaim, creating a wonderfully well-rounded collaborative space. She additionally worked with GoGreen to create a design which expresses the essential processes of the project, moving visitors between stations around the rooms. These stations point visitors to workshop areas for repair and repurposing, and on towards the display space, made up of shelves and rails all made from salvaged materials. This display space serves to redistribute great items to new students who would otherwise have had to purchase them new. In Ruth’s hands, images of landfill sites were re-imagined as ever-reducing through the actions of the engaged student community.
With a group of dedicated volunteers, we set up a regular pop-up shop to help spread the word about our activities in Kaim Co-op to a wider audience on campus. The shop contained a handpicked selection of items from the main hub ranging from clothes to books and kitchen utensils in order to give potential new users a flavour of the things they could pick up. Passers-by could take items away, learn about the regular workshop programme and sign up to our regular newsletter.
drop-in sessions
XMas craft fair In this workshop, GoGreen staff provided participants with the tools and inspiration needed to create some lovely Christmas gifts and decorations. These items included upcycled advent calendars, paper ornaments, bunting, and many other creative & sustainable additions to the holiday season.
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Kaim Co-op has been used widely for many purposes since its inception in September 2017. Our free shop has avoided a considerable amount of CO2 emissions by negating any need for items to ever be manufactured, and has additionally served as an open space where students, staff and other community members can come to socialise and share their enthusiasm for our eco-friendly ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ ethos.
FINAL REPORT 2017/18
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activities grid open sessions & events at bike pad WORKSHOPS
Other events
The primary way of increasing the bicycle maintenance skills of our community was the organisation of 3-hour long taught workshops themed around different bicycle mechanisms: Brakes, Gears, Wheels, Hub Systems, & and Regular Bike Maintenance. There were ten of these over the two semesters in 2017/18, and were attended by a total of sixteen participants. The results of the post-workshop surveys indicated that participants increased their skills in the relevant mechanism from an average of 2.44 to 7.88 (out of 10) and fifteen out of the sixteen of them indicated that they were now much more likely to repair their own bicycles rather than take them to a workshop or not use them.
open days & treasure hunt
Open sessions Over the course of the project, Bike Pad organised 3-hour walk-in sessions which took place weekly initially and eventually daily during the coming semesters. The sessions served to allow cyclists to bring their own bikes and learn how to fix and maintain them with the help of our Engagement Co-ordinator. There were a total of 155 of these sessions and they were the main method for engagement with our community; overall, they were attended 288 times, contributing to both our carbon savings targets from repaired bicycles and our aim of upskilling members of the community in bicycle maintenance. They were also the primary way of training our volunteers and of mentoring them on how to take charge of the workshop when the Revolve project ends.
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The two weeks before classes started in the Autumn semester were the best opportunity for introducing Revolve to our community. During this period we organised separate open days for our three different locations on campus, as well as a treasure hunt with giveaways and prizes for everyone who visited them. The events allowed us to showcase our venues and make them more visible on campus, as well as recruit volunteers.
Airyhall primary school session
Led bicycle ride A group of ten engineering students from Japan attended a summer project at RGU through the Nippon Foundation. We were tasked with providing seven of them with bicycles from LivEco’s bike hire fleet and organising a led ride to show them how to get to campus and navigate Aberdeen’s roads with confidence.
dr bike sessions In order to mark the national ‘Cycle to Work Day’ and ‘Winter Cycle to Work Day’ we set up a free repair and service station on campus on two separate occasions over the two semesters. The aim was to encourage cycling as a means of commuting to work/university by identifying and fixing urgent issues with the bikes that commuters brought to us. Overall, people brought sixteen bikes to the two events and we managed to service thirteen of them.
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As part of Revolve’s initiative to spread our passion for cycling to younger generations we arranged a visit to local school Airyhall Primary. We were keen to teach some basic maintenance skills to pupils in the hope that this knowledge would help them keep their bikes on the road and an integral part of their active lives. To this end we packed up our bike pumps, brake pads and all the essential lubricants to help them keep tyres full, chains oiled and to recognise a braking system in good working order. As well teaching the basics to 110 pupils across 3 classes we also kept them busy in groups competing to name the parts and pump up tyres.
Upcycle your cycle Michael Bowdidge is an artist, researcher and educator who works with found objects, images and sound. In this workshop he taught participants how to reuse bike parts to produce upcycled items of furniture.
FINAL REPORT 2017/18
VOLUNTEERING A variety of volunteering roles were on offer with the Revolve program. These Included: LivEco Zero Waste Cafe Cooks LivEco Zero Waste Cafe Events Team VegBag Marketing Team VegBag Scheme Co-ordinator VegBag Distributors & Drivers VegBag Collections & Packing Team Bike Hire Management Support Team Bike Pad Management Support Team Bike Pad Mechanics Kaim Co-op Volunteers Kaim Co-op Workshop Instructors StreetSport Engagement Volunteers Campus Event Support
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activities grid other events in the community freshers & Refreshers events
Vegbag promos: Campus & halls
In order to engage with the fresh intake at RGU, GoGreen descended on the main Halls of Residence sites to showcase the Revolve project to new students, and offer them free household items from our pop-up shop. This was a key opportunity to sell the concept of re-use before new students set out to furnish their new residences, as well as capture interest in future events and sign-ups to our communication list.
The aim of these promos was to introduce members of the RGU community to the VegBag Plus scheme and to increase the popularity among those who had already heard of it by talking to people, signing them up to our mailing list and giving away leaflets and free fruit & veg samples. With the help of volunteers, we organised a total of five promotional stalls in the different buildings on campus, as well as door-to-door visits to most of the university accommodation sites, resulting in more people discovering the scheme, more people signing up for reminders and a few recruited volunteers.
nus student eats conference Two members of GoGreen staff and one volunteer participated in the NUS Student Eats Conference, sharing our experience of running our VegBag Scheme and Community Zero Waste Cafe, and gaining insight to the key facets of turning an idea into an enterprise. A host of workshops and presentations were attended, covering topics such as sustainable enterprise, grass-roots activism, and campaign development.
ccf gathering Attending the annual Climate Challenge funding gathering is a way for our team to catch up with other CCF projects and the wider governmental agendas around environmental issues. This year we were treated to a very informative keynote speech from Roseanna Cunningham, as well as a number of aspiring snapshots from other CCF projects. Within our own project we managed to meet a practicing artist from Whale Arts in Edinburgh who went on to deliver a workshop with us and link up with the innovative research team at the Hutton Institute to collaborate on a citywide circular economy proposal.
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nus gatherings This wide-ranging event aimed to introduce the NUS campaigns and strategies for the 2017/18 academic year. It represented a great opportunity to liaise with fellow institutions and collaborate in areas such as engagement strategies and campaigns, and to share ideas for projects and best practice, as well as inspire colleges and universities not currently running sustainability projects to develop programmes in the coming year.
aberdeen adapts While we are keen to be at the forefront of reducing carbon emissions to avert climate change, we are also aware that climate change is already happening. The Aberdeen Adapts programme brought together a number of stakeholders involved in helping Aberdeen and the surrounding area develop a response to the changing conditions and landscape that will develop over time.
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live right housing fayre
ZWS ReUse Training
As part of the drive to redistribute donations of household items to students who would have otherwise bought them new, we took our pop up shop to the Live Right Housing Fayre. By having a presence amongst Aberdeen’s accommodation services and letting agencies we were able to give out many mundane but essential items to grateful arriving students and let them know about Kaim Co-op in the process.
In preparation for the launch of Revolve when students come back to RGU, three staff members travelled to Glasgow to attend a one-day workshop organised by Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS) on issues around reusing, repairing and upcycling. The main positives of the visit were the contacts we made with similar re-use organisations in Scotland and with members of ZWS themselves, as well as the valuable advice they provided which was of great help when it came time to organise our own spaces.
aberdeen climate action As well as work on campus it was important for the Revolve project to link up with other environmental activism taking place in the city and region. For this purpose we joined the organising committee for Northeast Climate Week, contributing design and coordination support to this vital and growing annual event. Through regular meetings the Revolve team were able to network with different organisations in the region, contributing two film screenings, one exhibition and one sell out fashion show to the Climate Week programme.
volunteer evenings A huge part of our work with volunteers is in devising projects that provide positive social spaces on campus for new participants to meet each other and develop support and friendship networks. To this end we organised intermittent volunteer evenings to run in parallel with other social events. These evenings (which also often involved food) provided a space for our regular participants to share their experiences, give us feedback on their activities and spread the word about volunteer opportunities to newer participants. For individuals working on the many separate strands of the Revolve project, they also provided a meeting space where volunteers could feel part of a bigger movement and learn to work together. Volunteer evenings have included testimonies on past experience, team building sessions and practical careers advice and guidance.
FINAL REPORT 2017/18
nus sustainability summit Two members of GoGreen staff headed to the NUS Sustainability Summit in Coventry to gain inspiration, learn best practice, and share our successes within the University and College sector. A range of workshops covered topics such as campaigning, developing a sustainable curriculum, and student engagement.
feed the city network Impact Hub Inverness hosted an event aimed at bringing together third sector organisations from across the North of Scotland to explore the potential for their existing or planned operations to grow and operate in a sustainable, social entrepreneurial way.
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Clothing & Kaim co-op outcomes 1 & 2
there will be a continued impact beyond the project term. For this reason, we have utilised a lifetime savings impact figure of 3, giving a total impact of 64.5 tonnes CO2e.
Waste-household swapshop of pop-up shops around campus to promote the new space and give out clothing.
waste-clothing & textiles outcome partially delivered 21.5 tonnes CO2e saved
Fast fashion is quickly becoming a fixture on our high street, and we became aware of the growing impact this is having on our environment due to the massive amounts of raw materials required, industrial processing, transportation and wastage as part of the whole production and retail process. With this in mind, the Revolve project looked to provide an alternative to the hyper-commercial norm through the development of an on-campus re-use hub. The purpose of the newly created Kaim Co-op was to facilitate re-use of clothes, encouraging our community members to donate unwanted items, find new items to cherish within the previously donated items, or borrow for a one-time occasion. Collections started in earnest, with a campus-based collections drive encouraging students to part with items at the end of the academic year, with an abundance of items coming in to be processed at this time. We wanted to interact with as wide an audience as possible, so an avid group of volunteers assisted staff members in staging a series
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Whilst we were confident that there would be useful engagement and impact through the swapshop in this simple direct re-use format, we wanted to go one step further and utilise those items that proved hard to shift, as well as support the development of Kaim Co-op as a creative re-use hub. Our initial research earlier in 2017 showed that only 4.7% of respondents currently repaired clothing, yet 70% said they were interested in learning to do so. Over the space of the year, our two swapshop Engagement Co-ordinators, Kim Norrie and Layla Sawford, staged a series of workshops designed to furnish our community with new skills and experience that would allow them to prolong the life of their favourite items of clothing, breathe new life into tired-looking pieces, and completely re-imagine the primary purpose of an item. In order to evaluate the impact of Kaim Co-op we designed a data collection process that aimed to be as simple and usable as possible. Items that were donated were categorised into clothing and textiles, weighed, and sometimes cleaned, then made available for immediate re-use. Capturing this information allowed us to calculate the positive environmental impact of avoiding new items being manufactured, and old items ending up in landfill or being sent for recycling. For each kg of clothing that we directly re-used we were able to claim a CO2e saving of 16.1kg, and for those that we repurposed, a slightly lower figure of 16kg was claimed. We also asked every customer whether they would have bought the items they had taken if they hadn’t got them from us, which highlighted the impact that we were having when we calculated that a massive 88% of customers were actively replacing consumption of new products with re-used items.
Lifetime savings
With Kaim Co-op now established at RGU and regular pop-up shops still proving popular throughout the campus, we are confident that
RGU: GOGREEn
outcome partially delivered 3.62 tonnes CO2e saved
To deal with the aforementioned tonnes of items destined for landfills seen in Aberdeen each June, we proposed creating a hub for these items and the student community, somewhere easily accessible, practical and open to new and familiar faces. A space that provided a collection and drop-off facility for unwanted goods that we would sort, check and repurpose for new students arriving the following September. When questioned, 94% of participants in our exploratory survey said they would like to see such a place on campus.
kg of materials redirected
kg of co2e saved
Furniture
0.33
Electricals
3.58
Furniture-Repurposed
0.19
Ferrous Metals
1.81
Non-Ferrous Metals
9.94
Mixed Metals
-0.95
Glass
0.23
Paper
1.27
Plastic
0.57
Wood
1.22
Kaim Co-op is the place that we made this happen. Dovetailing with our clothing and textiles swapshop, Kaim became a beacon for re-use amongst the consumer-led retail alternatives, offering a plethora of items for customers to take away, ranging from kitchen utensils to robot hoovers, crockery and cookware to household electricals. Working on a similar methodology to the textiles section, we were able to claim the adjacent carbon savings for every kg of material directly re-used. It was through this element of the project that we had some unexpected successes. Via discussions with University staff, we identified numerous instances where furniture, appliances and stationery were destined for recycling despite being in perfectly usable condition. We were able to intercept many of these items and put them to good use, and also partner up with local charity organisations to receive bulk amounts of furniture items in the future.
kaim co-op in numbers
Lifetime savings
As we have established an on campus facility and established new partnerships between the University and charitable organisations, we feel that due to long-term behaviour change and process change we can assume a lifetime savings factor of 5 to be appropriate. Therefore, the lifetime savings attributable to this element will be 18.105 tonnes of CO2e.
FINAL REPORT 2017/18
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Transport & Bike Pad outcomes 3 & 4 waste-bike workshop outcome partially delivered 2.3 tonnes CO2e saved
With the RGU campus being situated at the edge of town some distance from the majority of student housing, commuting is a necessity for the vast majority of staff and students. Cycling has always played an important part in this everyday task, and GoGreen have successfully established a bike hire scheme in previous years. However, we wanted to engage with and assist those that had their own bike, and also look at providing additional bikes to the hire scheme from a sustainable source. Building on an initial trial from 2016, we established a bike workshop on campus, fully stocked with tools, spare parts, and importantly, a mechanic, and christened it Bike Pad. This fantastic facility quickly established itself as a firm favourite amongst volunteers and community members, with regular maintenance sessions seeing over 100 cycles owned by community members coming through our workshop, with an impressive 87% being made roadworthy after being serviced. Bike Pad was always designed to be more than a drop-off service centre though, so every person requiring their cycle to be serviced was encouraged to learn the skills that would enable them to fix similar problems in the future. It is through this educational aspect that we aimed to build a community of cycle users who value their bikes, looking after them to prolong the use of their equipment instead of scrapping and buying new. We are happy to report that out of all of the people that filed in our post visit survey, 93% of people that had brake issues were now confident that they could fix them themselves in the future, 84% of people with tyre or inner tube issues thought similarly, and 77% of people with spoke and wheel issues felt confident that they would have no problem in sorting future problems with their newfound skills. This skills development aspect was something that we looked to develop even further, for those that had a keen interest in learning about particular aspects of
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transport & bike pad in numbers
bike maintenance. Over the course of the year, the Revolve project ran a series of ten workshops, covering a variety of skills from basic preventative maintenance, to servicing hubs and bottom brackets. These workshops allowed us to provide more in-depth guidance, empowering even complete novices to look after their bikes, whatever the condition of their equipment. Volunteer mechanics have played an important part in assisting us in fixing over 50 bikes that we rescued from sources such as Police Scotland and via public donations, with these cycles becoming part of the RGU bike hire fleet. In order to maximise their impact and reward them for their efforts, we placed 13 of them on a one day mechanics training course. Volunteers then put these new skills to good use, logging over 300 hours in Bike Pad over the year.
week. Over the duration, hire cycles that wouldn’t have been operational without Bike Pad intervention covered a total distance of 57,113 miles (91,914 km). The above data allowed us to calculate the carbon emissions that have been avoided, using the following conversion factors i.e. every kilometre covered saves the following amount of carbon from being emitted: Cycling as an alternative to bus travel - 0.102 kg Cycling as an alternative to car travel - 0.187 kg
Lifetime savings
With Bike Pad moving to a new, permanent location, and with a group of volunteers trained to continue the above activities, we feel that a lifetime savings factor of 5 is appropriate. Outcome 3 lifetime savings: 11.5 tonnes CO2e
travel-bike workshop outcome exceeded 8.1 tonnes CO2e saved
As previously mentioned, cycling is an important option in the travel choices of the staff and students that travel to campus each day. With waiting lists for hire bikes an ever-present issue, we looked at options for providing additional cycles to the fleet with as minimal an environmental impact as possible. As mentioned previously, over the project term we successfully fixed 50 bikes that were previously destined for landfill, or to forever linger in garages and sheds. These bikes were subsequently added to the bike hire pool, and the miles covered were recorded once they were utilised. Customers let us know what mode of transport they would have used if it had not been for the availability of said bikes, the number of miles and amount of trips that they were taking per
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FINAL REPORT 2017/18
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low carbon food options outcome 5
In September 2017, the Revolve team set about promoting this new option in earnest to the new intake of students at the RGU operated halls sites throughout Aberdeen. Our Engagement Co-ordinator, Dimo Peev, led a team of volunteers to knock on doors, hand out tasty samples of fruit and veg to those that signed up to our mailing list, and generally proselytize on the virtues of going organic. These halls visits were followed up with on-campus promotional stalls, with our smoothiebike proving as popular an engagement tool as ever, and alongside our regular newsletters to our expansive list of recipients, we felt we were well-placed to realise a return on our efforts in the form of additional customers to the scheme, requesting delivery to halls.
Low Carbon food options outcome NOT delivered The GoGreen organic VegBag scheme has been a popular stalwart of our activities over the past 3 or 4 years, with regular customers amongst our staff community, and new participants on a yearly basis from the student body. Having gained significant increases in orders with a concerted effort to develop the scheme in previous years through promotional events and marketing, alongside development of a robust ordering procedure featuring reminder emails and newsletters, we looked for opportunities to take the scheme to the next level. After assessing various options, such as adding non-fruit and veg items, increasing the frequency of orders and allowing our customers to select the items to be bought, we decided that a delivery service to halls of residence offered the most viable option for being added to the current scheme, and importantly, to be continued beyond the project funding period. This was backed up by surveys conducted in October 2016, where 45% percent of respondents said that offering this service would make them more likely to order.
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Over the proceeding weeks, it became apparent that actions hadn’t born the success that we anticipated, with minimal interest in the delivery service. This did coincide with a lower number of orders for the scheme as a whole compared to previous years, so we embarked upon another series of campus promotional events and redoubled our efforts to promote the service via social media and newsletter editions. We also looked farther afield, partnering with private halls provider Unite Students to offer the service to their residents. The early months of 2018 saw an increase in demand, largely thanks to our new partnership with Unite, but numbers were still below what we had anticipated when planning the project. Looking forward, our volunteer group are undecided whether they will continue to offer deliveries, but with the partnerships and equipment there to be utilised, there is hope that alongside a wider food or healthy living project the delivery service will hopefully find a format that will help it meet its potential.
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FINAL REPORT 2017/18
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community knowledge outcome 6
73% of first time knitters said they would knit again, and help work through our mountain of donated wool 87% of attendees said they would use the skills they learned in our popular felting workshops again. 67% stated that they learned new skills across all of our workshops “It’s easy to make something creative from very little materials, which is more personal. It makes Christmas more special.” - Christmas Craft Workshop Participant
volunteer testimony
“Thank you! These events are so great. The skills are great, but even more the atmosphere & sense of community is wonderful.” - Knit & Knatter Workshop Participant
carbon literacy outcome delivered Here at RGU Student Association we recognise the importance of actively involving our volunteer base in order to ensure the legacy of the project and to create a beneficial, inclusive programme of events. In addition to this, we also wanted to leave a lasting legacy of increased skills and knowledge on the subject of repair and re-use. Over the course of the Revolve project, our programme of workshops at Kaim Co-op and Bike Pad allowed the participants to learn these skills in a social setting, building a community that will take the lead on providing a local example of re-use and repair as an alternative to consumption of new products. In total, 13 workshops were conducted in Kaim Co-op, with a further 10 taking place at our bike workshop, Bike Pad.
evgenii zorin
Taking our newfound skills out into the community was something that the Revolve team wanted to achieve throughout the year. Teaming up with fellow RGU charity StreetSport, we set in place a plan to visit 25 sessions throughout the Aberdeen area, showcasing basic bike maintenance skills, engaging young people in the basics of keeping bikes on the road, and aiming to inspire the next generation of re-users and repairers. Despite the best efforts of the Aberdeen weather, we engaged with 185 children across 3 sites: Inchgarth Community Centre, Denis Law Cruyff Court, and Torry Academy.
“I’ve discovered RGU GoGreen through Bike Pad. I’d heard at the beginning of my 3rd year at RGU that there was a bike workshop on campus, and I decided to check it out, expecting nothing more than a place providing tools to repair your bicycle. Instead, what I found was a friendly community that not only helped me enhance my bike skills, but also provided me with a place where I could socialise and feel accepted. Through Bike Pad, I’ve discovered other environmental projects, such as Kaim Cottage and LivEco student group, which I’m currently volunteering for.”
While quantifying the impact of these workshops can be tricky, we asked all participants to complete a short survey to assess their opinion on whether they picked up any skills or knowledge throughout the sessions. 78% of respondents said they intended on using the workshop space again
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FINAL REPORT 2017/18
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partnerships gray’s school of art Multidisciplinary Projects By offering an understanding of the symbolic value underlying the material world, artists and designers have an important role to play in a transition to a circular economy. In beginning to re-value and re-imagine things previously considered throwaway, Revolve was keen to collaborate with the brilliant on campus resource that is Gray’s School of Art. To this end GoGreen worked with the Art School to deliver a multidisciplinary design project that saw 3rd year students from across Fashion & Textiles, 3D and Communication Design collaborate to produce innovative design ideas that fed into the Revolve project. Students were asked to help co-design & advertise the benefits of a more circular economy on and off of the university site, pushing the issue of sustainability to the fore of their creative praxis. Working in mixed groups across the three disciplines, students were given a selection of items from damaged nursing uniforms to old bike frames, broken electricals, pallets, pots and pans and of course used clothes. They were asked to not only re-imagine these items but also bring our backstage work on carbon savings to the forefront of its social and creative spaces. Over the week raised the following questions: Can design convey different consumer values through its interaction with discarded materials? What social value do objects hold; can these be challenged/changed? What about carbon values? What role can design play in communicating these? After an initial icebreaker and sharing of innovative eco practices across disciplines, the groups set to work thinking about concepts for their collections. Over the next few days they worked in studios across campus, before reconvening to give final presentations.
design with Vegware, to judge the group presentations and give the students feedback on their ideas. Both guests also gave inspiring talks. Kate shared details around her careful creative process, from harvest through to production and aftercare, leading to award winning vegan knitwear, whilst Hilal raised questions about the role of design in increasingly unsustainable consumption economies. Beyond the fantastic talks the GoGreen team were treated to twelve hugely interesting presentations from the student groups. Design solutions ranged from very conceptual ideas, including the development of a new currency, aptly named XS, involving a reward app giving out points for carbon saved in reusing and donating. It was suggested that collected points could be used in retail outlets on campus widening the network of folk involved with the circular economy. At the more practical end of the scale one group of students picked up the need for more social space on campus by building a portable bar, ‘Splinters’, from reclaimed pallets. Other highlights included the carefully researched ‘Scrub Up’ project that re-designed logo-less nursing uniforms, with little to no material waste, and highlighted projects that would benefit from the donations. We were also treated to bicycle furniture, kitchen herb gardens to encourage foraging in your homes, pop up DVD loan shelves with handmade blankets and a rag weaving how-to video which considered the mental health benefits of weaving alongside the carbon savings of giving worn out clothes a second life. As well as feeding directly into Revolve, many of the presentations won awards for potential, sustainability and social merit. In every case we worked to develop the best design seeds into sustainable methodologies, bringing student creativity to the forefront and providing them with opportunities to be the designers of circular futures.
We invited Kate Morris, from the eco fashion and textile brand CROP and Hilal Bugali Watson, a PhD design student who previously worked on product
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The garment project Pleased with the results of the multidisciplinary project we also initiated a collaboration with the first year Fashion & Textile course inviting the course leader, Elaine Gowans, to select worn out items from Kaim Co-op for students to deconstruct and reconstruct into new creations. The aim of the project was to challenge the students creative capabilities when working with boundaries and limited resources. We all interact with and react to objects every day; we work with them, we make ourselves ‘fit’ in and around them, and we are sometimes constrained by them. The students were asked to consider the ‘end of life’ garment with all their rips, tears, stains and historical conversations. How it can be adapted to our own needs as an everyday garment? How we exploit its persona through its form and/or function? How does the sports jacket, the hoodie, the tartan trousers, the cord skirt, the flared jeans and the indiscriminate shirt... how do they reveal their personality to us? While the art students worked intensively on the selection of unwanted donations we also approached the Fashion Management course in order to spread the sustainability message throughout the whole production process of the carbon heavy fashion and textile industry. We worked with two placement students, Chloe Mowat and Demi Mackay, to produce an Exhibition and Fashion Show that would showcase the final designs in a headline event as part of Climate Week North East. The students worked hard over the month on all the details of the show from lighting, sound and running order down to table decorations repurposed from a collection of jam jars. They collaborated with our designer, Naomi Walker, to produce a fantastic showcase that would display all aspects of the Revolve project side by side with the cutting edge designs. The event was also a chance for us to host all of the project collaborators who had helped to support our carbon saving efforts over the life of GoGreen and was a sellout. Given this we didn’t
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miss the opportunity to invite the LivEco Zero Waste Cafe in to cater for the 180 strong audience with fantastic culinary creations.
Robyn Beagrie
Emma Fraser
Leah Christie
Chiara Lamon
Erin Edwards
Nicole Schneider
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other partnerships Internal Partnerships As well as teaching sustainability to art, design and fashion students on taught modules and in placements, we worked with many different schools and departments, lending out our smoothie bike to the Nutrition and Dietetics department to visit school children all over Scotland and giving unsalvageable bikes to engineering students to integrate into their land yacht project. In RGU we are a leading voice and founding member on the universities’ sustainability advisory group and meet regularly with the Estates Department to discuss how waste provisions can lower their landfill stats. As part of Revolve we work with the Erasmus programme to welcome overseas students and provide them with many of the essential household items that they would otherwise have to buy new only to leave behind at the end of their relatively short stay. Alongside this we work in partnership with university-run and private accomodation sites to collect discarded items at the end of term and returning to give them out at the beginning of term with our peripatetic pop up stall. This year we also initiated a collaboration with the nursing department to redistribute unwanted scrubs, and hired out our bikes to visiting Japanese business students over the summer with an accompanying tutorial led by our bike mechanic Dimo Peev on how to survive the perils of Aberdonian roads. Finally we worked with the on site Treehouse Nursery to redistribute bespoke wooden nursery furniture to a local primary school in Kincorth.
The Allotment Market Stall (Tams) As well as our long term partnership with Lembas Organics over the summer months when demand for delivery was lower, we also worked with the allotment market stall saving excess fruit and vegetables that would otherwise go to landfill
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and delivering them by low carbon means. The partnership with TAMS was part of a larger growing effort that included taking seed potatoes from one seed forward to grow with students at our own allotment site. The fruits of this activity on the allotment feed into our VegBag Scheme, allowing them to add home grown produce to the attractive offers in the bags.
Streetsport sessions As can be seen by our collaboration with Kincorth primary school we were interested in our partnership programme stretching beyond the confines of the institution. One of our main partners in this process was with the RGU-based charity StreetSport, which aims to reduce antisocial behaviour by providing children with sports activities in their own neighbourhoods. With StreetSport we visited the far corners of the city from Northfield to Torry and the city centre, participating in 25 of their sessions and servicing a total of 40 bikes. As well as servicing we delivered a range of fun bike-related obstacle courses and competitions. By engaging with over 185 children, we were able to empower young people in different communities to gain a well informed passion for bikes and cycling.
take one action film series, Mental health Monthly & Rgu Film Society In partnership with Take One Action, the Revolve project scheduled a mini film series over the year, showcasing 7 different films, covering such diverse topics as rising sea levels, the ethics of the metals in our mobiles, poverty, sustainable transport and urban design & development, consumption habits and more. We wanted to do more than bring people together to watch a film however, we wanted people to come away from each event with a new understanding of the topic, and feel inspired to
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take a proactive steps to reduce their own impact, help others reduce theirs, and build a society that truly values its environment, people, and animals. Films were shown in a variety of settings in order to tap into as wide an audience as possible, with venues including our newly launched Kaim Co-op, our friends at the LivEco Zero Waste Cafe, and with the well-established Mental Health Movie Monthly, where we explored the topics of climate change, poverty and mental health.
Other collaborations Aside from these ongoing collaborations we also worked to share knowledge, skills and resources with many other inspirational CCF projects in the network and enlisted the help of independent artists and designers working in the city on many aspects of the project. In this way our list of partners is long, and evidences a commitment to collaborative working that also feels vital in the move towards a circular economy. When it was required we also worked further afield, for example we went as far as Nigeria to work with the Siddiqah Foundation to give the unwanted nurses uniforms a good home. The foundation is a registered non-governmental organisation that operates a food and health outreach initiative, empowerment scheme and support programmes. We made this connection through close-working with one of our Nigerian Nursing students, Azeezat Ogunbadejo, who also ran a workshop to repurpose the uniforms, teaching many students sewing skills and techniques in the process.
Police Scotland Shrub, Edinburgh Siddiqah Foundation, lagos South Seeds, Glasgow Streetsport Take One Action The Allotment Market Stall Transition Stirling Treehouse nursery Unite Students University of West of Scotland Students association Whale Arts, Edinburgh Zero Waste Scotland
External Partners Aberdeen Climate Action All in ideas Cfine (Community Food initiatives North East) Edinburgh Bike co-op InchGarth Community centre Instant neighbour Kincorth primary Lembas Organics Mealmarket Student Roost NUS Scotland One Seed forward
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learning &
reflection Community Outreach volunteer These sessions are focus all about helping students
azeezat OGUNBADEJO
continue cycling to campus by making sure their bikes are safe to ride. We brought in qualified mechanics from a local bike shop and set up in a prominent location so students and staff could drop by with their bikes for a free service. The most common fixes were replacing brake pads, fixing punctures and indexing gears, though we tackled some more challenging cases too!
Azeezat found out about the swap shop through her weekly visits to the multi-faith spaces in the same building. She was happy to chat to us about her passion for clothing design and fashion and took a number of items from our mounting pile of clothing to wear or re-purpose for her three kids. We learned that Azeezat was studying Nursing at RGU and was excited to hear about the large number of unused scrubs that had been donated to the project when RGU were rebranding. Azeezat was not only happy to put her sewing skills to good use in reworking the uniforms but also she used her connections in Nigeria to find a suitable charity to redistribute them to (we were unable to redistribute them to a more local charity as NHS regulations don’t permit their scrubs being re-used in the UK). In this way Revolve plugged in to a number of her interests and concerns and we were very happy with the results.
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textiles & household Waste reduction Despite saving a healthy weight of items going to landfill, our carbon results were lower than expected. This can largely be put down to a difference in the proportion of different materials that we saw coming through the doors, with significant amounts of furniture being seen, and lower (but still significant) amounts of clothing coming through the swapshops. Initial efforts to clear large amounts of items left in halls of residence were hampered by conflicting opinions and experiences between ourselves and University staff. With existing partnerships with charities, there was an expectation amongst some University staff that there would be very little left to collect, given the large volumes of items that they saw heading to collection points at term end. We did however manage to prove that not all students were pro-active, and large amounts were recovered. This has resulted in a closer relationship with the estates team, who we have engaged with since to discuss options for maximising the impact of similar programmes in the future. The learning experience from this part of the project has been that it is worth re-assessing existing partnerships and operations on a regular basis to see if they can be improved, and that interpretations of “usable” need to be addressed on an institutional basis to avoid unnecessary wastage.
Waste Reduction-Bicycles This section of the project has quickly established itself as a popular venue for volunteers and participants to get involved in fixing and maintaining bikes. However, our target of 50 bikes being rescued from landfill was met going down to the wire. This can largely be attributed to the requirement to train staff and allow time to build up confidence and competency, and while our bike mechanic proved
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able in the long-term, recruiting an experienced mechanic would have allowed the workshop to become productive over the quieter summer months, which would have in turn allowed a larger pool of repaired bikes to be available at the start of semester 1. Staffing can be a tricky thing to get right when initiating a new project, and the experience has taught us to analyse the most pressing and technical attributes that projects require when recruiting.
volunteer testimony
irina cristina bogdan
VegBag Plus Through the Revolve project we gained unique insights into student lives in halls. First through our collection process, which saw us visiting flats to remove discarded household items, and then at the start of the new term when we went door to door again to publicise our VegBag delivery scheme. What we discovered through this process is that although support staff in the Residential Life team were enthusiastic about the delivery service, the majority of residents- often moving out of home for the first time- are lacking the cooking skills to make use of a regular vegetable deliveries. By far the most popular item to leave behind was the baking tray indicating the majority of students oven cook items from frozen. On reflection we felt that a development like VegBag Plus would consequently work better with a programme of outreach cookery workshops that could pass on simple skills.
volunteering Our volunteering group has once again proven pivotal to the successes that we have had throughout the project. We have been overawed by the contribution of certain individuals, putting in significant hours and becoming involved in the administration of the project as well as the more “interesting” events and activities. With the end of the project imminently upon us, we have been working hard to handover many of the tasks and duties that make our spaces and services run, and it has perhaps become apparent that this process couldn’t have commenced early enough, with adjustments for a volunteer-run programme dovetailing with final data collection and analysis for reporting. There is a slight feeling that after 11 months of designing, planning, implementing and running our project, we are finally up and running, just to downscale at the end of the funding period.
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“Volunteering for GoGreen helped me spend my energy in a way that benefited students on campus, the community, the environment and myself. I learned new skills, made friends and felt I belonged to a group even though I was far away from my home, Romania. At Kaim Co-op, I was a Visual Merchandiser, dressing the mannequins in the Swap Shop. This way, I developed my styling skills while learning about the environmental benefits of the circular economy. Taking part in the workshops at Kaim made me want to be a Creative Workshop Volunteer myself, to have the chance to repurpose donated items, such as cardboard and wool and prepare materials to teach others. I was also a Pop-up Shop Volunteer encouraging people to take any items they wanted from our Free Pop-up Shop and to get involved in the green movement. This helped me improve my organisational, social, communication and carbon literacy skills. I convinced people to sign up to our mailing list, participate in GoGreen’s projects and make donations. Having these positive experiences, I knew that GoGreen could help me improve myself, so even though I had no idea how to fix a bike, I signed up as a Bike Pad Mechanic. I was right; GoGreen offered training and support, making me feel confident to repair donated bicycles and to help other students fix their own bikes. I was so keen in getting involved in everything I could, that I finally volunteered to model for GoGreen’s Revolve Fashion Show. I am sad to hear the team is leaving, but I am motivated to continue the projects in the future.”
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project legacy Over the past twelve months we have seen a fantastic level of engagement from throughout our community in the Revolve project, and as always, we are determined that the places, procedures and activities that we initiated as part of the project continue beyond the end of the funding period.
re-use spaces At the forefront of this effort are the two new re-use spaces and workshops that we have set up on campus. We are happy to report that Robert Gordon University, who’s campus we operate in, have kindly allowed our Bike Pad workshop to set up in a permanent location, allowing it to become a fixture within the community. Alongside the Student Association run Kaim Cottage, which hosts our swapshops and re-use workshop, this space will allow the new students that arrive into our community every year to take part in learning about a circular economy, gain new skills and be at the forefront of this movement at RGU.
volunteering & engagement Obviously, the above spaces require coordination, staffing, promoting and management, which with a lack of funding is a tricky task to fulfill. Luckily, we have seen a committed group of volunteers assist with the project over the past year, and it is to them that we look to pass the baton. The volunteers in Bike Pad underwent intensive training with Edinburgh Bike Co-op, supplemented with ongoing support and guidance from our resident mechanic, Dimo Peev, in order to give them as much experience as possible fixing the wide array of cycles that came through our workshop. Volunteers at Kaim Co-op got involved running pop-up shops around campus and organising visual merchandising in the swapshops.
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volunteer development The final months saw us begin the transition of the running of these spaces to our volunteer group, involving them more in the decision making process and encouraging them to think about the future. Kaim volunteers played a huge role in the weighing process of goods, organising & facilitating workshops, and ordering equipment for Bike Pad. We also looked to partner this years volunteers with an established student group, LivEco who have successfully operated projects from our previous CCF project from 2016/17. The work of Naomi Walker, our Engagement Co-ordinator: Legacy & Reporting has been significant in this aspect, running a number of sessions to build a cohesive team, discussing organisational and communication structures within the group so that they can work towards their common goals. RGU Business Management students have also had significant involvement in Bike Pad processes, which has served as a mutual benefit for the students as well as GoGreen, providing the students with experience and assistance for Bike Pad volunteers.
institutional change Throughout the project, the relationship between the Revolve team and the University Estates Department became key to successfully intercepting items and materials that would normally go to landfill or recycling. Over the course of the year, we saw a marked change in the attitude towards the issue of clearing Halls of Residence at semester end, going from what we saw as an institutional naivety to actively seeking collaboration to build on existing collection schemes with charitable organisations. The desire to maintain an active clearance and re-use programme was also discussed in planning meetings for the coming summer, alongside a concerted effort to find direct re-use options for planed furniture disposals from the University Estate, where previously items were sent for recycling.
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finance Our project budget of £145,093.92 covered 3.6 FTE members of staff, equipment and parts costs for our new spaces on campus, marketing materials to help promote the programmes, support staff at RGU:Union, and training for staff and volunteers. Throughout the course of the project we have run with a projected surplus due to reduced staffing costs caused by changes in personal at 2 stages throughout the year. We also had a reduced spend on workshop equipment in Kaim Co-op due to the emergence of equipment such as mannequins, sewing machines, and wool being donated or loaned indefinitely to the project from partner organisations and generous individuals. This underspend has been put to good use however, with additional materials being purchased for our resource hungry Bike Pad workshop, enabling us to ensure that this facility continues to be effective long after the funding period ends, and an additional member of staff coming on board to assist with the final report and legacy aspects of the project.
thank you We would like to say a big thank you to all the groups and individuals who contributed to the initiative.
Robert Gordon University Estates Department Janitorial Staff Building Reception Teams Events Team Colin Jamieson AV IT Susan Cumming & The School of Nursing & Midwifery Stuart & Kelly at Made
Gray’s School of Art
Phil Chapman Dave Crossen Karen Dicken Sue Fairburn Elaine Gowans Keith Gray Josie Steed Design, Fashion & Textiles Students
A proportion (10.03%) of our overall project budget was funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which required an additional level of administration in comparison to the remainder of the budget. With this new regime for the project management and finance team to get used to, there was a delay in submitting claims for ERDF budget headings, especially for salary claims, which came up against a significant barrier due to the unique way that RGU:Union receives its funding from the University.
Aberdeen University Student Association
After becoming accustomed to the new requirements, and with ongoing support from Keep Scotland Beautiful staff, the process of claiming ERDF expenditure became easier as the project went on.
And our funders:
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SHRUB Edinburgh Remakery Treehouse Nursery Zero Waste Scotland
Keep Scotland Beautiful Scottish Government Greener Scotland European Regional Development Fund
Designed by Naomi Walker
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