APPF staff at our ANU Canberra node have earned a Gold award for sustainability in the 2022 Green Impact program.

Led by Dr Frederike Stock, a team calling themselves the AG-Champs and including staff from APPF-ANU and the ANU Centre for Entrepreneurial Agri-Technology (CEAT) took part in Green Impact earlier this year and earned the certificate for the number of actions and changes they made in their work areas to support sustainability.

“The program was a lot of fun and got us talking about how we can make small changes in our daily operations to help reduce our environmental impact,” Dr Stock said.

“It also gave us a chance to interact with the ANU Below Zero team and we’re looking forward to continuing our efforts in next year’s program, which will kick off in March 2023.”

‘Below Zero’ is the ANU’s mission to reduce net emissions on campus to less than zero by 2030. Participation in the Green Impact program dovetails with the project and was actively supported by the Below Zero team.

The AG-Champs sustainability initiatives included:

  • Connecting solar panels on APPF’s growth capsules to a performance dashboard, so they could better monitor the amount of solar energy being generated.
  • Offering more vegetarian options when catering.
  • Calculating and recording CO2 emissions for business travel and attending conferences virtually if possible.
  • Making it easier to attend staff meetings and conferences remotely, to reduce travel.
  • Replacing a capsule coffee machine that generated a lot of waste with a non-capsule alternative.

…and more.

Green Impact is an international program that promotes sustainability awareness and engagement. It is being delivered locally by Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability (ACTS), based at ANU. Teams from the education, business, health arts and public sectors can all take part.

Once registered, each team is provided with a toolkit of actions and ideas. They follow these through and must provide evidence to earn recognition for their activities. In 2022, 73 teams from 44 institutions took part across Australasia, and completed 864 sustainability actions in one month.

A team from Monash University completed 85 actions to win the 2022 Green Impact Cup.

The 2023 Green Impact program will begin in March next year and Dr Stock says the AG-Champs are enthusiastic about taking part again.

If you’d like to take part too, visit ACTS Green Impact for more information.