From our Green Rep, Lee Towers:

As a green rep I assess Teesside University environmental policy in terms of how it affects student and staff, the wider public and the environment. This can involve assessing policies and university practices from the green space provided and maintained around the university, to unnecessary energy use due to the high temperature of taps in toilets. It also involves assessing other environmentally adjacent policy, such as so-called artificial intelligence, which has extremely high energy and water demands negatively affecting communities around the world now and set to exacerbate in the future. The overall aim here is to make the University honour it own rhetoric about being environmentally and socially responsible, but also push it go go further.

I also work across the university sector with other green reps, finding out best practices that can be a model both for the UCU branch campaigns but also the university more broadly. Working across the green rep network also allows for sharing of strategies of struggle against unjust and unsustainable action by universities. For example, I’m in contact with a green rep from Bristol University who is working on how universities manage their considerable funds and how to divest or stop these from funding fossil fuels.