July 18, 2007—People & Planet, the UK’s student campaign network, has published the first-ever green league table showing the environmental performance of Britain’s universities. Leeds Met, Plymouth, Hertfordshire, and Glamorgan top the list.
The Green League 2007 celebrates success, and exposes those institutions who are have yet to live up to their environmental responsibilities, says People & Planet. The network hopes the list will establish a competition mechanism between universities to drive standards up.
The lack of transparency and accountability up to this point has allowed many institutions to be complacent about their environmental impact, opines People & Planet. A recent report by Business in the Community reportedly found that the higher education sector scored a poor average of only 55% on the BITC environment index, compared to the business average of 83%.
The list ranks all British universities—awarding them with a First, 2:1, 2:2, Third, or Fail—based on eight different environmental criteria, both policy and performance related. It incorporates data unpublished in the public domain, including the percentage of energy purchased from renewable sources, percentage of waste recycled, and CO2 emissions for each institution.
