We're changing the way we recycle in Eat Central, making it even easier to separate out all your waste.

Our new-look main campus café has sustainability at its heart as well as offering a new food court-style way of eating together.

When you have finished your meal in Eat Central, you can clear your tray into each of the bins, following the labels and images for guidance. You will be able to recycle food waste, compostable food containers and cutlery, plastic bottles and cans. There’s even a separate bin for coffee cups, and we're working on recycling these very soon!

This is an advanced system – it’s different from what is being done elsewhere on campus and around Brighton too. For the first few weeks, there will be recycling champions on hand during the busy lunchtime sessions to help you use the new bins correctly to ensure the normal recycling isn't contaminated and gets recycled properly.

What happens to your leftovers?

Our state-of-the-art bio-digester processes up to 300kg of food waste and plant-based packaging in just 24 hours, creating nutrient-rich compost for our campus grounds. All food waste and packaging from Eat Central goes into here to be mulched down; it reduces the volume of the organic waste by around 80%.

The compost produced by our bio-digester is used around our beautiful campus to help nature flourish. We were the first UK university to adopt this innovative tech in 2019, and we've dramatically cut our food waste collection and carbon footprint as a result.

Keen to ditch the disposable cups?

We’re launching a new returnable cup scheme to save thousands of disposable cups from going into the bin.

The new initiative will see returnable cups available in Eat Central, ACCA Café, Botanical Café, the Library Café and the Veg Bowl @ Dhaba from Monday, 16 September, saving you money and making it super convenient as you don’t even have to carry your empty cup around.

In October 2023, more than 17,000 cups were thrown away in those five cafes here on campus. But this new alternative will change the way we use cups to save you money and time. Staff and students will pay £3.95 to join the scheme: you’ll receive your hot drink in a reusable cup which you can hand back and exchange for a keyring token to get a new cup the next time you order.

Read more about how this works.

How to find out more

We’re looking for volunteers to help us change the way we recycle in Eat Central. If you want to spend an hour showing diners how to do it right, please fill in this sign-up form.

To stay updated and share your thoughts, you can join the Sustainability at Sussex community on Viva Engage to share ideas and feedback, subscribe to the Sustainable Sussex newsletter and follow @sustainablesussexuni on Instagram.

We have a post on Viva Engage where we'll be answering all your questions about the new recycling system, so please take a look to find out more.