At York Conferences, we pride ourselves on being green. In the last three years, we have moved up from Bronze, to Silver, to Gold winners of the NUS Green Impact Award which has been a great achievement as a workplace.
The Green Impact award is a prestigious environmental accreditation scheme run by the National Union of Students (NUS). York Conferences have been awarded the highest possible Green Impact accreditation, the gold award, which recognises the extraordinary work of our employees and the effect they've have had on decreasing the environmental footprint of the University of York.
All of the activities for Green Impact are embedded in our day to day office routine and come naturally to everyone here. Green Impact workbooks are available to departments so that the positive impact of the scheme is spread throughout the University.
The efforts of York Conferences were largely driven by Katy Holmes, our Sales and Events Coordinator. She was awarded Green Impact’s 2014
“Environmental Hero Award” and Green Impact representatives described her as “an enthusiastic leader of her team at York Conferences within Commercial Services. Leading by example and full of innovative ideas, Katy was an excellent project leader, which led to her securing the Environmental Hero award 2014. Congratulations!”
Katy who is always looking for a new way to make the Conference Office more environmentally friendly, said
“one of the biggest achievements that we have done is that we now have a food caddy in the office where we put all of our food waste. We weighed the food caddy empty and weighed it again when it was full and used these measurements to calculate that, each year, we are generating 335kg of food waste that is now no longer going into a landfill site.”
Green Impact rewards workplaces for their continued environmental work and monitors how “green” they are as a workplace. York Conferences became involved in the scheme as a part of the University of York’s wider Carbon Management Plan and sustainability efforts.