Hi Matthew, 

 

Thank you for your submission. I would love to see a community garden/ student allotments but unfortunately in the past the University have rejected the idea due to lack of land (and at the moment there are many building plans to build on the areas of green space we have, see the 10 year plan here: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/community/building-projects/rationalising-highfield-car-parking.page)

We have a couple of great societies that are involved in gardening- they're super welcoming and you can contact the committee about getting invovled, from their pages:

https://www.facebook.com/campuscollectivesoton/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/sucv1/

Furthermore, there is opportunity for students to enagage with the gardening team at St James Park (about 1.5 miles for Highfield, in the City), if you are interested please check out their website: https://fosjp.org.uk/category/fosjp-gardening-team/ .

BioCycle is a student group that distributes food waste bins and compostable bags to students and collects them weekly on their bikes and delivers the waste to a local community farm to be composted. If you're interested in finding out more, check out their FaceBook group here: https://www.facebook.com/BioCycleSoton/

Finally, we work really hard to reduce food waste as much as possible here at SUSU, by a "sell and return" scheme in place between The Shop and suppliers, reducing food prices around "best before" and by cooking to order in The Bridge and other outlets.

 

I hope this answers your questions. If you would like to get in touch for more information, please email me at vpwelfare@susu.org. Also, if you would like to be invovled further in sustainability discussions, please come along to our next Sustainability Zone meeting on 26th November 1pm-3pm. 

 

Best wishes, 

 

Isabella Camilleri

VP Welfare 

University of Southampton Students' Union