Our programmes and campaigns

Results

RecycleLeague 2019 took place over an intensive 8 week campaign period from October to December 2019, with 10 universities and students’ unions competing to see who could increase their recycling rate the most. 922 tonnes of recycling was prevented from going to landfill and on average the universities increased their rates by an impressive 8.3%.

The University of Worcester was named the winning institution, seeing the biggest uptake in its recycling rates by a staggering 28% against its baseline for the previous year. Worcester focused its activities in the St Johns halls of residence, piloting a ‘graffiti a bin’ competition where students competed to decorate on-site recycle bins, which ran alongside a social media campaign, completely run by their digital students.

 

The University of Warwick and University of Bath gained highly commended awards for the significant reach of their engagement activities.

 

Across the rest of the country, other creative actions included Thames littler-picking events, DIY soap making, cooking workshops to highlight exciting ways of reducing food waste, fast-fashion workshops teaching people the benefits of upcycling, and recycling-themed quizzes on social media to educate people about recycling. By engaging staff and students in innovative stunts and projects to get them really thinking about where their waste ends up, they did an incredible job at proving the worth of the programme and testing out how the best results could be achieved.

 

Overall, the array of innovative campaigns engaged more than 39,000 people and recycled 70 tonnes more than in the same period in 2018.

 

Throughout the competition, running as a pilot in 2019, the invaluable experiences of staff and students has helped identify how it can be developed and continued in the future. We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who took part and helped us shape this work!

 

You can read more about the achievements of the pilot in our national report available here.