Thursday 31-01-2019 - 11:34

A rant, by Lucy Follon

Hi, I’m back with more tear-able puns to tell you about my latest quest to save you lovely lot from having to wastefully print out your assignments as well as sticking them on Turnitin. Go Green Week is coming up on the 11 February and it’s got me thinking about how annoying it is when some tutors pretend they can’t read from a computer screen, meaning students have to trek to uni to pointlessly stick their assignments into one of these: 

Do you reckon those tutors know that 1,591 tonnes of waste is produced EVERY YEAR from MMU and only half of that gets recycled? That’s the same weight as 122 double decker Magic buses. Everyone’s talking about plastics right now, THINK OF THE TURTLES. But — let me remind you about our good old friend paper — paper is destroying our forests at an alarming rate, reducing our planet’s ability to neutralise and cope with all the harmful stuff we pump into our atmosphere by using and using and using. There’s a more scientific way of explaining this, but for now we’ll call it a ‘tear-able mess’.

The best way to reduce our waste is to not make it in the first place. So where can we cut down? Manchester Met is named as ‘the greenest UK university’ but even though the University uses recycled paper, that doesn’t give us a free pass to go willy-nilly on printing, That dissertation goes somewhere once you’ve thrown it into a submission box, and although I bet you’re super happy to see it gone after writing the whole damn thing, there’s no law that guarantees your lecturer recycles it after, especially if you’ve bound it in a plastic ring bind or stuck metal staples into it.

For most undergrads, your dissertation is perhaps the biggest submission you will make as a student. Even though it might seem a while away yet and you have bigger things to think about right now, I’m sat here thinking where the hell is all that paper going to come from?!

If every student at MMU were to print a 40 page assignment tomorrow on A4, that’s equivalent to 96 trees worth of paper IN ONE GO. If that happened three times a year, that’s 288 trees EVERY year. That’s without even thinking about the cash that costs students, that total bill would come to £319,200 A YEAR.

Luckily, the situation isn’t quite this bad anymore! Because of Turnitin, tutors are now able to receive coursework, assignments and dissertations online. I would love to tell you that was the end of it, however there are still 814 students who are currently being asked to submit a printed copy of their dissertation as well as the online submission. This doesn’t make sense, and is incredibly annoying for those students. There is no rule set by the University that says tutors have to ask students to hand in a physical copy of written submissions. It’s up to the person who sets your coursework whether you need to print it or not.

It’s my mission to get all tutors and lecturers on board with paperless submissions so students don’t treck into uni to submit something in paper that they’ve already uploaded on Turnitin. Then we can get rid those pointless submission boxes and fill the space with something that would be more useful to students, like a computer or a soft space to nap... Idk.

If you’re one of those 814 students who still has to print out essays, you can help me by speaking to your lecturers and urging them to choose online submission only when setting your coursework. Tell them you want to Go Green and make your course more sustainable and this is one way they can help.

If you have been seriously emotionally affected by any of the issues within this blog you can get more involved with Go Green Week and learn about other ways you can live a more sustainable life.

Come and pick some litter on All Saints and Whitworth Park on Wednesday 13th from 14:00 till 16:00 (meet in the middle of All Saints Park) or come and talk to The Union directly about your thoughts on sustainability issues at our Brutally Honest Conversations workshop, Friday 15th 16:30 – 18:30. For all the info, keep an eye on our sustainability webpage.