Sustainable Development

Westminster Business School (WBS) is proud to be a signatory of the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and a member of the international PRME community.

The Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) is a United Nations-supported initiative founded in 2007. As a platform to raise the profile of sustainability in schools around the world, PRME equips today's business students with the understanding and ability to deliver change tomorrow. By joining PRME, a voluntary initiative with over 800 signatories worldwide, Westminster Business School has made a powerful commitment to advancing values such as sustainability, responsibility, ethics in teaching, and research leadership.

To learn more about the PRME community, visit the PRME website.

In 2021–22 and with the support of the Quintin Hogg Trust, we launched a Westminster Sustainability Fund providing students, regardless of their course degree or level, with the opportunity to carry out sustainability-related projects and interventions which are co-created, designed and implemented by students and University colleagues working in partnership.

The Sustainability Fund has continued in 2023-24, with teams awarded funding to explore and develop ideas from improving pathological image analysis to increasing inclusion in screen arts like TV and film. Their projects will be realised at the close of the 2023-24 spring semester.

Read more about 2022-23's winning projects. 

Dr Pooja Basnett, Dr Linda Percy and Dr Dipankar Sengupta are leading the vertically integrated Cavendish Living Lab, which focuses on building sustainable solutions using AI-based and data-driven methods against global contemporary challenges. Students can choose to work on either or all of the following three strands of the project over two years:

• urban food growing using hydroponic systems
• bioplastics production using food waste from Westminster campuses
• water management

Follow the team's progress via the Cavendish Living Lab website.

Bass Culture is a research project led by Mykaell Riley within the Black Music Research Unit (BMRU) with an aim of defining Black British music through exploring its historical and cultural significance over six decades.

The key objective of Bass Culture is to change the narrative and associated perceptions of the history of popular music in Britain, recognising the role played by reggae music and its accompanying historical and political narrative in the British music industry, media and scholarship.

Dr Pooja Basnett and her team are investigating the production of biodegradable plastics from bacteria. Biobased, biodegradable plastics represent a green alternative to conventional plastics.

The team's primary focus is to build a sustainable, competitive and cost-effective route to produce biodegradable bioplastics that can compete with petroleum-based plastics in terms of price and performance.

The Gene Editors of the Future programme, run by Dr Kalpana Surendranath in our Genome Engineering Lab, offers students within the School of Life Sciences the opportunity to work alongside experts from the basics to the advanced stages of Biomedical Engineering.

Over 170 students from the School are participating in the newest iteration of the programme running from October 2022 to August 2023, impacting their future careers and the wider society. The project also led to the publishing of scientific articles and a presentation at a Royal Society Heads of University Bioscience event.

To monitor and measure the use of water, the University has installed automatic meter reading devices on the water meters at Marylebone Campus and Alexander Fleming Hall. This allows the University to track water consumption in real-time via a live digital portal and compare water use over various durations. The aim is to install a device on each water meter across all campuses.

The University has procured 100% renewable electricity from the grid for nine consecutive years. We are keen to install our own renewables across the Westminster campus. A new combined solar photovoltaics (PV) and solar thermal system was installed at Harrow Halls in 2021, providing self-generated solar electricity and heating. The estimated carbon saving is 40 tonnes of carbon per annum. We will be rolling out PV installations at other campus sites.

We have continuously improved our University sites by ensuring that energy efficiency and environmental improvements are considered in our capital projects and programme of refurbishments. Specifically, we have continued to upgrade lighting, heating and building fabric to ensure that our campuses operate in the most sustainable way possible, offering a comfortable environment for students, colleagues and visitors.

We are committed to reducing waste as detailed in our Waste Management Policy, published in 2021. The university encourages re-use and recycling wherever possible and adhere to our legal 'Duty of Care' obligations as dictated by the Waste Hierarchy. In 2022-23 we successfully diverted 99% from landfill and aim to continue this in upcoming years.

Our targets and performance

In 2022, we commissioned decarbonisation energy audits. These involved detailed surveys of the University's buildings and infrastructure and aimed to identify ways to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions from heating our buildings.

The results from these provided us with the information needed to set data-driven net zero commitments. In our pathway to becoming completely net-zero by 2050, we have set an ambitious target to reach net zero for Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 2035, and a 50% reduction in Scope 3 carbon emissions by 2035.

We have reached our previous target set by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to reduce Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 43% by 2020. We achieved this in 2018–19, reducing our emissions by 56% from our baseline.

Carbon Monitoring and Certification

We have signed up for Planet Mark’s Net Zero Certification. This programme will measure and verify our carbon emissions and ensure we have credible, science-based net zero targets in place. We have also expanded our energy monitoring system across the University to ensure we proactively make energy reductions and carbon management improvements across our sites. This includes developing a methodology to measure our Scope 3 carbon emissions in a more robust way.

Carbon Reduction Project

Westminster secured a £1.2m grant as part of the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme to transform one of our buildings at Harrow Campus by installing a low-carbon heating system, improving its energy efficiency, and adding solar panels to generate renewable energy. This will reduce the carbon impact of the building significantly and is a great step towards achieving our net zero ambitions.

The University published an Ethical and Sustainable Investment Policy for the first time in 2021, demonstrating its commitment to responsible investing. This includes investing in organisations and countries that demonstrate a positive approach to individuals, communities and environmental performance and those that develop environmental technologies to reduce the impacts of polluting and destructive industries and climate change.

The University has a responsibility to choose the most sustainable, ethical options during purchasing decisions. We are dedicated to building strong supplier relationships.

Located in the heart of London, it is vital we as a community as mindful of the ecosystems around us. We maintain growing spaces at our Cavendish, Marylebone and Harrow campuses for both students and colleagues to enjoy. This helps to conserve habitats for local fauna and flora.

In 2022, the University of Westminster was awarded the Hedgehog Friendly Campus Silver Accreditation for our work in protecting hedgehogs and local wildlife.

We work closely with our catering partner, Aramark, to integrate our sustainable ethos into all kitchen and catering facilities. In June 2023, we achieved the Food for Life Served Here Bronze Accreditation, in partnership with the Soil Association. We aim to minimise waste across our facilities and promote good practice.

Our caterers have partnered with TooGoodToGo with the aim of reducing food waste across campuses. The 'Wipe Out Waste' campaign aims to eliminate food waste within our campus kitchens by reusing food items which are usually disposed of.

We aspire to undertake new construction development to achieve a BREEAM rating of Excellent as a minimum.  For the majority of our refit and refurbishment projects, we will align ourselves to SKA-level standards and other emerging measures of building performance, such as LEED and the WELL Building Standard.

This will be achieved through early collaboration in the development of all building projects, ensuring the best long-term outcomes for our students and colleagues whilst minimising the impact of our built environment on the planet.