Project Overview

EcoCampus encourages, rewards and provides tools to assist universities in moving towards environmental sustainability and good operational and management practices.

EcoCampus is closely aligned to ISO 14001, the international environmental management system (EMS) standard and BS 8555 the British guidance standard. Following extensive consultation with the sector, EcoCampus has been designed to be achievable through a phased-approach, enabling universities to achieve progress and implement a full management system up to the ISO14001 standards in ‘bite sized chunks’. The adoption of this approach should encourage institutional learning in this area and promote the adoption of good management practice.

EcoCampus will also benchmarks environmental improvement. When an institution has achieved a certain level of environmental improvement it will be, subject to external verification, given an EcoCampus award. The scheme will eventually be offered to all institutions committed to a programme of continuous improvement of environmental sustainability.

The overall aim of this project is to develop EcoCampus into a fully functional, national scheme with supporting tools that will enable universities to take up a structured management system. This will be achieved in three phases. Phase 1 will involve the commencment of the pilot undertaken by 10 institutions Phase II: the development of the EcoCampus Awards scheme. Phase III: will see the scheme launched nationally.