News | Thursday, 4th April 2019

Sustainability expertise features at Greater Manchester Green Summit

Reducing waste and cutting carbon

Manchester Metropolitan promoted its leading environment expertise at the Greater Manchester Green Summit.

This included Manchester Metropolitan’s Environment and Carbon Literacy teams, and the University’s Manchester Fuel Cell Innovation Centre (MFCIC) and Waste 2 Resource Innovation Network.

MFCIC announced the intention to develop a Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Strategy for Greater Manchester at the event, held at the Lowry on March 25.

The summit was hosted by Mayor Andy Burnham and also saw the launch of Greater Manchester’s five-year Environment Plan and the aim to be the UK’s leading low-carbon city-region.

Collaboration

It brought together universities, local authorities, businesses, residents, students and schools to discuss how Manchester can best deliver challenging targets including:

• Achieve carbon neutrality by 2038
• Improve air quality
• Reduce resource consumption
• Protect and improve the natural environment
• Increase resilience and adapt to the impacts of climate change on the city

Helena Tinker, Manchester Metropolitan’s Head of Environmental Sustainability, joined other Manchester organisations on stage to commit to working together towards a shared vision of eradicating avoidable single-use plastics from catering, labs and stationery across Greater Manchester universities, and further education colleges by 2022.

This challenging target is part of the University's wider commitment to lead the way on sustainability and achieve carbon neutral campuses across Greater Manchester by 2038.

Single-use

Helena said: “We are really pleased to be working with other great Manchester institutions to lead the way in reducing our single-use plastics consumption.

“We’ve already removed single-use plastic cutlery from our catering outlets, and are selling reusable water bottles and coffee cups; as well as installing new water fountains across our campus. 

“Our labs have also reviewed single use plastics used in our research and teaching to understand where we can choose alternative materials. This work will provide a framework to support other universities in other cities to follow suit.”

Fuel cells

Amer Gaffar, Director of the Manchester Fuel Cell Innovation Centre, announced the plans develop a Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Strategy for Greater Manchester.

The strategy will be officially launched within 12 months of the 2019 summit and will be adopted within the region. It is set to be a coalition between the public and private sector and will:

• Be aligned to the North West and Northern Powerhouse ambition 
• Support the North West to become the UK's first Low Carbon Industrial Cluster, which the government wants to be in place by 2030 and one that is looking at mobilising £500m of investment in the low carbon industry
• Integrate with the proposed Greater Manchester smart energy plan, the focus of which is generation and storage, decarbonisation of heat and low carbon transport
• Act as a realistic guide to defining a comprehensive research programme that will bring together stakeholders, and ensure that Greater Manchester/North West competencies are at the forefront of science and technology on a global scale 
   

Various academic members of staff also contributed their expertise to the Innovation Zone, where they were part of round-table discussions responding to a series of topics set by the Green Summit team. These covered topics from built environments to clean energy and waste management.

The objective for the Innovation Zone was to engage business, academics, policy makers and other delegates in a creative dialogue on what innovation programmes Greater Manchester should be nurturing in the immediate future.

The output will be a co-created follow-up report that will chart Manchester’s route map to a carbon neutral city supported by the kind of innovation the city region is famous for.