Sustainable Futures Week

The University's Sustainable Futures Event runs from Monday 29th November to Friday 3rd of December and there are a range of great events taking place on campus and online. 

A world of sustainability-related resources

The Library provides access to a huge range of resources on sustainability, climate change and environmental issues. We're highlighting sustainability-related ebooks on our homepage all this week, and also some subject-specific titles on our Subject Guides for Business and Engineering. 

The following databases provide access to peer-reviewed articles, case studies and conference proceedings on sustainability issues across a wide range of academic disciplines:

• GreenFILE covers all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. The database provides indexing provides indexing and abstracts for more than 1 million records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 15,000 records.

• ProQuest's Environmental Science Database is a cross-disciplinary resource that  supports research and learning in environmental science and related fields. Content is selected from disciplines such as engineering, biotechnology, bacteriology, atmospheric science, ecology, and biology. You'll find articles on subjects including climate change and global warming, conservation, endangered species, environmental education, environmental engineering, environmental law and policy and more. 
• IEEE Xplore is one of the world's leading engineering databases and has sustainability-related content on computing, technology, engineering, energy and construction. Key IEEE journals in these areas include IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy and IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing. IEEE Xplore provides access to conference proceedings from a wide range of sustainability focused events. 

You'll find more databases on our Full A-Z of Databases and on your Subject Guide. 

Sustainability-Focused Films on Academic Video Online

You'll find a wide range of environment and sustainability-focused content on Academic Video Online, our fantastic new streaming video resource. Visit our Academic Video Online guide for featured titles, including award winning documentary features and nature series' from the BBC. 

Greening the Library

The Library is committed to making our services more sustainable and have made a number of  environmentally friendly improvements including:

• motion sensitive lighting in the library stacks which reduces energy consumption during periods of low footfall (like the middle of the night)
• motion sensitive taps in our toilets and efficient hand dryers in place of paper towels 
• efficient EnergyStar 2.0 compliant MFDs (printers/copiers/scanners) which save both electricity and ink
• We use plastic-free paper in our printers which is sustainably sourced, certified carbon neutral and both PEFC and EU Ecolabel-certified 
• The monitors on Library PCs time out to save energy and PC users are also logged out after a period of inactivity

Since 2012 we've been using Anybook as our recycling and disposal partner. We send Anybook our outdated, unused or damaged bookstock and they resell or recycle it. In 2019 we sent 2658.95 kg of books to Anybook, and they recycled 1207.15 kg of that (the weight of a small car!). Anybook are a great source of second hand books - you can browse their store here. 

UoB Sustainable Futures Event

Follow the UoB Life Team on Twitter and Instagram to keep up to date with all the happenings from the Sustainable Futures event. UoB Sports are organising a Wellness Walk to Queens Park and there is a fantastic eco-hamper to be won!