Green Campus

With summer coming to an end, our green campus will turn into beautiful colours. The leaves of the hundreds of trees will change from bright orange to dark red, from yellow to brown and many other colours of the rainbow. This transition can be very beautiful, especially with an Indian summer in October.

There is another transition not so apparent, where people try to turn our campus into a green campus all year around: a green campus also means a sustainable campus. You have probably experienced it at other organisations and institutions where you have to separate your waste. You have to think twice or even thrice in what waste bin you have to put your coffee cup, plastic spoon, newspaper and serviette. At Tilburg University waste such as glass, paper, batteries etc. is pre-separated. Let alone the other waste is being separated at the end of the ‘waste chain’, meaning that by doing so 87 % of the waste will be used again. This all turns out to be ‘greener’ than pre-separation off all waste.

A successful endeavour to transition to a sustainable campus involves many stakeholders and many other aspects such as environmental issues, use of energy, consumption patterns, local transportation of all our students, employees and of the visitors coming to the campus. 60% of the universities carbon footprint is caused by commuting: transportation of students and employees from home to the university and back. Tilburg University students travel about almost 100 million kilometers every year. Of those kilometers 15 million kilometers are travelled by car and only 7 million by bicycle! Tilburg University will work in the next coming years on keeping this campus green, in all its aspects. You can help as well and enjoy our green campus.

Hans-Georg van Liempd is program manager at TiU and president of EAIE. He blogs for Univers.