Search these pages to explore a selection of our directory of activities. You can use the keyword search and filter buttons to discover how we are addressing each of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and the five priorities in our Social Responsibility and Civic Engagement Plan. You can also filter activities by location and function.
Filtering subjects: Environmental sustainability
In an effort to make our University more sustainable, food waste caddies have been installed in all staff kitchens on the main campus. The goal is simple: to cut down on the greenhouse gases linked to food waste. Instead of going to landfill and generating more greenhouse gases, the food waste collected is taken to a specialised processing plant where it is used to generate electricity and produce a fertiliser which can be used in farming.
Our new travel policy, supports our ambition to be a leader in developing sustainable research and teaching practices. This is part of a wider project to reduce our total carbon footprint in line with our Environmental Sustainability Strategy. As part of this, there is guidance and funding in place to support staff with greener travel. In 2022/23 we nearly halved our air travel emissions, compared to pre-pandemic levels, as a result of the new policy.
The Purple Wave is a UoM Sport initiative designed to bring our community together to celebrate physical activity and shared experiences. It’s all about participation, not elite performance – just having fun, making friends, and being active with like-minded people. As part of this, people can become a Purplewave fundraiser, raising money at events like the Great Manchester Run. Over the years, hundreds of wonderful fundraisers have raised tens of thousands of pounds to support good causes right here on campus. From rebuilding the Paterson Cancer Research building to providing disadvantaged students with scholarships – brilliant Purple Wave fundraisers have helped make some amazing things happen for our community.
Every September, our University takes part in a fun and friendly biking competition called Cycle September. The initiative encourages staff and students to ditch their cars and hop on their bicycles for their daily commute. In 2023, we placed 1st in Greater Manchester and 3rd overall in the UK, but there’s more to it than just the competition, choosing to cycle improves physical and mental wellbeing, reduces our carbon footprint and helps decrease traffic congestion around campus.
A partnership dedicated to tackling the impact of textile waste in the football industry has been launched between The University of Manchester and RÆBURN Design – a leading sustainable fashion studio. The new project, KIT:BAG by RÆBURN, will work with local sportswear suppliers and the local community to transform surplus football shirts into unique reusable tote bags, while educating them of the environmental impacts of textile waste and how we can extend the life of our garments. It aims to provide a fun, responsible way to keep kits in circulation while shining a light on the large-scale problem in the industry.
Maretório is a project focussed on making space to facilitate meaningful communication about climate change for those vulnerable, coastal communities in Brazil who may be most affected by it. University of Manchester team members have collaborated with other institutional partners to create educational resources and children’s games to empower local people to engage with climate change as they view it and using language that is personal and relevant to them.
Our environmental sustainability strategy, Our Sustainable Future, describes how we will reduce our carbon footprint, promote sustainability in our teaching and learning and research and innovation, and engage and support our community in the transition to a more sustainable society. Our strategy sets out the practical steps we are committing to, where it is already clear how best to protect and enhance our environment. We commit to transparency in reporting our progress towards our sustainability goals. We also outline our commitment to collaboration and deep enquiry where the solutions are less obvious, the challenges more complex or we need to be part of a broader shift to make the necessary changes possible.
Our University is working towards kite-marking all undergraduate courses with the relevant United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) they address. This will enable prospective students to immediately see which SDGs the course they are interested in links to and how that learning will make a difference in the world. Following the successful pilot project in our Faculty of Science and Engineering, work is now underway for all undergraduate courses to be kite marked within our Faculty of Humanities, followed by courses offered by our Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health.
Each year, over 17,000 students graduate from The University of Manchester, many of whom are already making contributions to our city and beyond through healthcare, education and protecting the natural environment. At each graduation ceremony, we celebrate our graduates and ask them ‘how do they hope to make a difference following their degree?’ Watch our Greater Manchester Graduates YouTube playlist.
Fallowfield community project is a long-term initiative to reduce the waste and fly-tipping issues and to improve recycling rates on the Fallowfield Brow. Students from our University volunteer alongside local residents, Manchester Student Homes, Manchester City Council and Biffa to remove litter from an alleyway, clear weeds and install new planters to make a positive impact on the local community and the environment.
Each year, we host the Making a Difference Awards to celebrate the incredible and inspiring work of our University community. The awards highlight the extensive range of social responsibility initiatives of our staff, students, alumni and external partners, and covers categories such as benefit to research; widening participation; environmental sustainability and equality, diversity and inclusion.
Our university has contributed to the Global University Social Responsibility Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), which allows users to learn about the general framework of university social responsibility as well as understand effective practices to design, plan, implement, and evaluate their own activities.
Alliance Manchester Business School and Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIOIR) are developing a more precise understanding of the productivity challenges in the construction sector and hope to uncover ways in which more sustainable practices can deliver productivity improvements. The research project focuses on solutions for the UK market and involves extensive collaboration with industry. Importantly, the ultimate aim is to help advance towards the UK’s net-zero target and improve productivity growth targets.
We have cut our air travel emissions by 46% compared to pre-pandemic levels, decreasing them from 18,641 tonnes of CO2e (CO2equivalent) in 2018/19 to just over 10,000 tonnes of CO2e in 2022/23. The reduction in our emissions is equivalent to the carbon produced from driving over 32.5 million miles in an average petrol car. Our new travel policy, which was put into effect last year, supports our ambition to be a leader in developing sustainable research and teaching practices. It includes several changes such as encouraging staff to have meetings online rather than in-person and to consider travelling by rail rather than air.
Our University Living Lab applies the expertise of students to real-world sustainability challenges through developing student research projects with external organisations to help meet sustainability goals. Through the University Living Lab, the University has saved CO2 through active travel, shaped municipal climate change policy, increased biodiversity and enabled ethical consumption whilst empowering and equipping the future workforce of a net zero world. In 2022, the Living Lab was nominated for The Earthshot Prize for practical action on climate change.
Manchester Museum’s Top Floor is a space for people to come together to learn, share ideas and connect with the community. You’ll find education groups, charities, artists, writers, staff and students co-working and collaborating here, with a shared commitment to social and environmental justice. The Museum has also appointed Hannah Hartley as the Environmental Action Manager, where she works across all areas of the museum to drive forward its ambitions in environmental thinking and action, establishing sustainable practices, and building on the Museum’s rich experience in developing narratives and programming in response to the climate crisis.
The University has been working with an international team of colleagues to create a pioneering research platform called ‘Virtual Labs’, which uses autonomous AI to retrieve and share relevant knowledge with research teams around the world who are now in a race to mitigate the impact of climate change. The technology will also help fast-track new research and innovation to support breakthroughs in diverse areas of study, from the development of new advanced materials to the design of new drugs.
The voices of 40 migrant-background 14-18-year-olds in Manchester and Melbourne have taken part in producing a climate education resource for teachers, students and researchers, entitled Young People at a Crossroads: Stories of climate education, action and adaptation from around the world. The project was led by the University of Manchester’s Sustainable Consumption Institute in partnership with researchers at the University of Melbourne. The team set out to explore and enable conversations about climate change in homes where, through migration, parents and young people grew up in times and places with different exposures to environmental challenges and different information about climate change.
We launched the first ever museum-sector-specific Carbon Literacy toolkit as part of Roots & Branches, a partnership between Manchester Museum, Museum Development North West (MDNW), and The Carbon Literacy project. The toolkit helps museum professionals and volunteers undertake training, to then certify as Carbon Literate. This foundational work supports staff, volunteers, and partners to build their understanding of climate action, so that they can make informed sustainable choices. The project also encourages museums to develop organisational pledges to act against climate change.
We host an annual Sustainability Challenge photography competition, asking students to submit a picture that raises awareness of a sustainability issue that they are passionate about. Alongside this, the challenge encourages students to express their opinions and critically engage with issues relating to climate change.
Sustainable Futures aims to bring together the unique depth and breadth of internationally leading research at our University, as well as interdisciplinary working to produce sustainable solutions for urgent environmental challenges. The organisation also aims to develop complete understandings of the environmental systems on which we depend and how humans interact with them, spurring scientific innovation and facilitating societal change at a scale and pace to address environmental crises.
Each year our University organises the Student Volunteering Week which aims to encourage students to take part in various volunteering opportunities to help society and the environment. For example, in 2025, in partnership with Ardwick Climate Action, students took part in sprucing up areas around Kale Street and the Mancunian Way, improving the biodiversity of the area and making it cleaner and greener for the residents.
A researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the Sustainable Consumption Institute has co-published a report entitled ‘Being Brave: Innovative Solutions to Public Food Procurement.’ The report highlights how to improve food systems and the resilience of food procurement while also reducing its impact on the climate. The report also finds that there is a pressing need to improve school food provision and that adopting a more sustainable approach to school meals could facilitate substantial benefits in children’s nutrition and health, as well as reduced carbon emissions.
Dr. Sherilyn MacGregor, Reader in Environmental Politics at our University, is the lead author of a major report ‘Caring in a Changing Climate‘ commissioned by Oxfam America that investigates the impacts of climate breakdown, climate mitigation and adaptations on care work. The report calls for greater actions to limit greenhouse gas emissions and a more significant focus on the nexus of climate and care work within policy and research. It points to the need for climate initiatives to pursue gender-transformative approaches via the adoption of care sensitive interventions.
Our University plays a key role in providing expertise on how we can reach the University’s goal of Zero Carbon by 2038, which is pivotal to influencing stakeholders to take greater action in addressing climate change. The Green Summit brings together residents, businesses, policy makers and community groups that share a determination for the city-region to be carbon neutral by 2038.
