Ayrshire College serves up new sustainability initiative
Ayrshire College is taking a major step to reduce its plastic waste.
Students and staff at Ayrshire College looking to buy a hot beverage from the College’s coffee shops or refectories will now be able to take their drink away in a new re-usable coffee cup.
This will result in a reduction in the use of polyethylene-lined disposable coffee cups throughout the College.
To encourage students and staff to buy the re-usable cup – which costs just 60p - anyone who presents their cup at the point of purchase will receive a 10p discount on all hot drinks.
The new cups will be available to purchase from the start of the 2019/20 session.
Ayrshire College is committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050. Ayrshire College’s catering department has already made great strides in reducing the College’s environmental impact:
- A budgetary investment was made last year to move to all compostable PLA packing.
- More food was produced in-house, reducing the amount of supplier visits to the College campuses.
- Through a procurement exercise, the College was able to reduce its catering suppliers by 50%.
- All vending and soft drink fridges throughout the campuses go into sleep mode, turning on whenever they are used.
Peter Bacchetti, Catering Services Manager at Ayrshire College, said “One of our key objectives is to look at how we can continue lowering harmful waste on the environment. Waste plastics are a contamination on nature and organic life. Our focus really needs to be on how we best respect the plastics that we do use.
“If we can help shift attitudes and behaviours towards reusing, recycling and respecting the plastics that we use, then this should in turn have the sort of positive impact that we wish for on the world that we live.”
21 August 2019
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