The Awards

The Union have sent in their first ever submission to the Sound Environmental Impact Award run by NUS Services Ltd this submission will hopefully achieve the Bronze Award for 2009/10 working towards the Silver Award in 2010/11. 
The Sound Impact Award was set up back in 2006 to encourage Unions to improve their best environmental practise and learn from what other Unions do well. The idea is to allow Unions to gain credit for what they are doing to be Environmentally and Ethically sound through the awards scheme and to give them an incentive to improve.  The award has a number of essential criteria that Unions must meet in order to gain either Bronze or Silver awards and then a number of bonus criteria to gain extra points.
Unions must comply with all the Bronze criteria to gain the Bronze award and additionally the Silver criteria and also get 430 points overall to get Silver.  The top five scoring Unions also get the Gold standard and the top scoring Union is the overall winner.

More on the award...

The award covers a whole range of areas from waste, energy use, food, transport, water, campaign work, awareness raising, community relations and much more.
Examples of criteria are:

-  Does the Union use recycled paper?

-  Does the Union have at least one active policy on a specific ethical or environmental issue?
-  Does the Union have a have recycling scheme?

For further information about Sound Impact or to view the workbook for this year’s award with a full list of criteria and evidence needed follow the link below to the website:
    
http://www.nus.org.uk/About-NUS/Ethical--Environmental/Sound---an-ethical-and-environmental-brand