Do you care about the planet? Do you want to teach your fellow students how to reduce the amount of waste that they produce and increase recycling rates?

If so we want you to be rewarded for designing our recycling information and posters on campus.

There will be three cash prizes up for grabs for the best entries: £500 for 1^st place; £250 for 2^nd place and £100 for 3^rd place.  If you win, your work will also be promoted by the University, and you will have a lasting record of your creativity and innovation that you can reference and share to help with future employability.

We're looking for participants to create content for one of two categories:

• How to recycle signs for our external recycling bins. Photos of bins as follows (A3 size window)

• Awareness raising material for students as videos, and web content that will form part of new student inductions and education of our existing campus population, such as through social media. You can generate this content through a medium of your choice such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, physical posters or QR code linked web content.

How to enter

The competition will open for entries from 03 March 2022 to 28 March 2022. You will be able to submit your entry using an online application found on our Sustainability Events and Competitions page from 03 March.

The winners will be announced in April 2022.

If you have any questions, you can contact the University Sustainability Team at sustainable@sussex.ac.uk

Who can take part?

All current undergraduate or postgraduate students can apply. You can work as an individual or as a team of up to four people, whether you will still be studying at Sussex next year or not. Teams can be made up of students from different schools and subjects.

What are we looking for?

Winning entries are likely to meet the following criteria:

• Increase recycling rates on campus – making sure that people know where to recycle things and how to do it correctly
• Encourage a reduction in the volume of overall waste produced e.g. by encouraging greater reuse of items as opposed to purchase and/or disposal
• Support the implementation of the University of Sussex Waste Reduction, Reuse and Recycling Policy
• Be fun, innovative, creative and engaging so that students will want to engage with the content, remember and share it with friends.

Further Information

The University of Sussex have set out the following objectives in our Waste Reduction, Reuse and Recycling Policy:

• Reduce the volume of waste produced per students by 10% by 2025
• Achieve target recycling 50% of our waste by 2025
• Improve monitoring and measuring of waste management
• To promote adherence to the waste hierarchy
• To improve waste signage and facilities
• To minimise the use of single-use plastics and disposable items
• To encourage our partners and supply chain to adhere to the principles set out in our policy

You can find out more about the University of Sussex Sustainability Strategy here.