Environment & Sustainability
Welcome to Bangor Students’ Union Green Pages! At BSU we recognise the environmental challenges which lie ahead of all of us. Regardless of your degree choice, whether you have come to Bangor from Wales, England or are an international student, the choices you make during your time at Bangor have an impact on the local area you are living in and our shared global environment. These pages are here to inform you and help you live a more sustainable lifestyle.
Ecological Living
If you’ve ever thought about reducing your ecological footprint, then you’re probably already familiar with the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra. This is shorthand advice for reducing the amount of products (and the associated energy, pollution and carbon emissions) you go through, re-using things rather than throwing them away and buying new ones, and finally when you have something you really can’t re-use you put it in a recycling box instead of the landfill bin. The three R’s save you money as well as the planet’s natural resources.
Along with the three R’s, we should also consider where our products come from in the first place. A good example is in clothing. We all need clothes (it’s a little chilly for nudism in Bangor) but some of them are manufactured in sweat shops in Pakistan from pesticide-soaked cotton plants and shipped over half the world to get to the shop. Maybe we should look out for fair-trade or organic items where we can. Also we don’t need new clothes every fortnight. We all re-use clothes, but sometimes we get bored of them or they go out of fashion; this is where we can give them to friends or a charity shop. Eventually those jeans rip or stain and they’re not so good to wear anymore so we can recycle them by making them into something else like those denim handbags which became trendy a couple of years ago.
Once you get into the habit of thinking ecologically, it becomes second-nature to turn off lights and cut down on heating bills by wearing an extra layer.
Societies and local organisations:
- People and Planet
- Students for Treborth Action Group
- Bangor Forest Garden
- Treborth Botanic Garden
- Bangor Freecycle