Gold award for Schwarzman Centre's Green Impact team

2 July 2026
Joe O'Connor
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A team from the Schwarzman Centre has won a Gold award at Oxford University's Green Impact Awards 2026.

Green Impact is the University’s initiative to embed the Environmental Sustainability Strategy into practice by breaking it down into manageable practical steps. In this way, teams of staff and students can play a significant role in ensuring that the University’s environmental impact is as sustainable as it can be.

In the Schwarzman Centre, a cross-departmental team formed with the aim of ensuring that the policies and practices in the new building met with the sustainable promise inbuilt with its passivhaus construction. The team met monthly, and worked through the programme’s toolkit to perform actions. These included:

  • Growing plants and sharing them with students, so that they could have greenery (and information on care) in their rooms
  • A Propagation Station, where one member taught staff and students how to propagate cuttings for their own use
  • Ensuring that information on environmentally sustainable practices is available to all new starters in their induction
  • Providing information on sustainable travel options to staff and visitors, including public transport, as well as the university’s bike repair and salary sacrifice schemes

Additionally, the team was able to draw on the good practice already put in place by the Facilities Management and Operations teams:

  • Efficient printers have been installed in the building, reducing energy use
  • Guidance to users on waste disposal is being installed, ensuring that as much material can be recycled as possible

Depending on the number of actions completed, teams can achieve different levels of recognition. Eight months after forming, the Schwarzman Centre team received a Gold award.

With a strong cross-departmental team now in place, the team is looking forward to pushing on and supporting one another to develop a number of larger projects, including the Cultural Programme’s aim to implement the Theatre Green Book.