University of Worcester

The Worcester Way to a healthy campus

Despite growing awareness of the need to eat more sustainably, actual behavioural change is hard to achieve. Food practices are complex; they are interlinked with elements of everyday life and shaped by and rooted in the expectations and habits of society. Changing the way people eat requires the need to address individual motivations, cognitions, and skills, but also their interactions with the socio-cultural and physical environment in which food practices are embedded in.

At the University of Worcester, we used the Individual, Social and Material model (ISM) to achieve substantive and long-lasting change.

The ‘Worcester Way’ is a series of interventions which aimed to have active participation of individual campus users, tried to promote social norms and established material interventions to make things easy and fun to facilitate the change process required. We have done this by learning from and utilising the tools and research strengths of sustainable food experts in Europe.

Annual carbon savings achieved with the initiative:
CO2t savings 2021/2022: 4.5k tonnes for the whole project (Estimated).
That’s all 6,557 people Nov 2019 – Dec a saving of about 1.7kg of CO2e 1,670 litres of water per. 

Top 3 Learnings

1. Raised awareness and knowledge on sustainable and healthy diets of students, staff and in our food service provider
2. We have reduced the average environmental impact of the dishes served in our dining room in CO2e emissions and amount of water used.
3. Helped to create guidelines and toolkit that’s available to all so they can replicate our project.