Water
Water is scarce resource, and we are aware of the importance of water pollution prevention and sustainable use of water resources.
We commit to reducing our water consumption by 15% by 2028 using 2022 as a baseline. Find out more information about the setting of this target.
We adhere to UK government guidelines on water discharge and standards to uphold water quality and protect ecosystems, wildlife, and human health and welfare. We also have a target of zero pollution incidents for emissions and discharges.
Water dispensers
Search the map to find our water dispensers, situated across campus.
Staff and students are reminded to think about how they can manage water use in the most efficient and effective ways, such as when working in a lab.
Preventing water system pollution
Our Code of Practice for Design Teams requires all capital projects to complete and sign off the University’s bespoke Environmental Sustainability Project Tracker (PDF, 2.1MB) or Tracker Lite for smaller projects. Within the tracker is a section on water and drainage, with criteria on sustainable urban drainage that support the increase of biodiversity, habitat creation and local transpirative cooling.
Our project tracker requires all building projects to:
- Reduce the total demand of potable water.
- Reduce storm water run-off and minimise negative environmental impact by using sustainable urban drainage systems.
- Follow UK Government guidelines on water discharge and standards to uphold water quality and protect ecosystems, wildlife, and human health and welfare.
Our policies and processes (including our policy on plastics (Word Doc, 233KB)) help ensure that we prevent and reduce marine pollution of all kinds and reducing the effect of land-based activities.
Water extraction on campus
In line with our Code of Practice, we follow specific criteria on sustainable urban drainage.
Requirements
- Ensuring that the design has no greater run-off from the site than pre-development following EA guidance.
- Investigating potential of using permeable surface and minimising impervious area.
- Recording pre-development proportion of permeable surfaces and aim at increasing it.
- Prioritising SUDs solutions that support the increase of biodiversity, habitat creation and local transpirative cooling.
Restrictions due to ground conditions and basements
Some projects reaching completion have experienced limitations to sustainable urban drainage (SUDs) due to local ground conditions and buried basements, but have nonetheless implemented:
- Green infrastructure, planting to increase interception and transpiration, and bio-retention tree pits for irrigation. These are not connected to the drainage network to avoid actively discharging land drainage to the local sewer network and thus reducing impact within the catchment areas.
- Green roofs to bring additional absorbency.
- Introduction of permeable landscaping to prvious hard landscaped areas.
- Blue roof systems to attenuate storm water runoff.
- Attenuation via below ground drainage infrastructure sized to meet a minimum 30% reduction beyond existing runoff. This is bettered for lower return periods where up to a 55% reduction in peak runoff rate can be achieved for the one in 30-year storm.
(Note, this information has been taken from ES trackers and reports for the following projects: Engineering Buildings A and B, Royce Institute, Pankhurst Institute).
Wastewater
We re-use rainwater on campus and our water is treated by United Utilities at one of their 569 wastewater treatment works.