Q&A – How can we choose sustainability?
Do you have questions about how to choose sustainability?
At this Q&A, we asked Emma Garnett, one of the experts taking part in ‘Reducing an organisation’s footprint’; Siobhan Anderson and Hugo Richardson from the Tyre Collective, whose work is featured in ‘Driving for change in plastic pollution’; and Heather Koldewey who spoke about ‘Ocean optimism in a sea of plastic‘, your questions about what we can all do to live more sustainably.
This Q&A session was chaired by Seth Daood.
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Welcome to Choosing sustainability
Seth Daood is an undergraduate studying Zoology at Cambridge. As well as producing his own videos aimed at widening access to the University, he has long-running interests in sustainability and nature conservation. He will share his views on why we should all choose sustainability.
Reducing an organisation’s footprint
Three University pioneers set out how they're transforming the footprint of an 800 year-old institution. Focusing on food, Amy, Nick and Emma will explain how science, cookery and smart business-sense came together to make a real difference.
Driving for change in plastic pollution
The Tyre Collective is a clean-tech company, building innovative solutions to save our air from tyre wear.
Ocean optimism in a sea of plastic
Discarded plastics pose a major threat to marine biodiversity but Heather Koldewey explains how she's protecting the ocean from plastic pollution.
Seth Daood
Seth Daood is a third-year Zoology undergraduate at Cambridge, where he focuses on conservation, evolution and ecology, particularly primates (ask any of his supervisors about how he never fails to mention a primate in his essays!). He is also the co-president of the Cambridge Wildlife Conservation Society, a society which aims to connect individuals with wildlife and the outdoors both locally and globally. As an individual, Seth has had long-running interests in diversity, social justice, climate activism and theatre – matters that more often than not go hand in hand with one another. He has worked to boost representation both in science and Cambridge as a whole, focusing on supporting students from traditionally under-represented backgrounds. He finds that this work has given him hope for the future – seeing how the field of conservation, but also science more generally, is diversifying and reaching a broader range of individuals from a range of backgrounds is inspiring. It is not only the western world threatened by climate change. Seth believes that together, the broad range of individuals now being represented in the field, and those to come, have the best chance of fighting the global impact of anthropogenic climate change.
Emma Garnett
Emma joined the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership in September 2020 as a Research Associate to work on sustainability in supermarket supply chains. For her PhD she tested which interventions were most effective to reduce meat consumption and increase vegetarian sales in university cafeterias. She has previously worked with several different academic institutions, NGOs and businesses including the University of Kiel (Germany), Microsoft Research (UK) and Zoological Society London (UK). More generally, Emma is interested in understanding how to equitably overcome economic, political and social barriers to conserving biodiversity and reaching absolute zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Siobhan Anderson
Siobhan is a Kinesiologist and Design Engineer. She received her MA/MSc in Innovation Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London; and graduated with honours in Kinesiology with minors in Biology and Fine Art from California State University, Sacramento. Her passion for design, the natural sciences, and the environment have lead her work to focus on the intersection of these disciplines and solutions for a sustainable future. Her work has been the recipient of the UK National Winner & International runner up for the James Dyson Award and the Mayor of London’s Entrepreneur Environment Award. She is a Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at The Tyre Collective, heading research and testing development.
Hugo Richardson
Hugo Richardson graduated in Mechanical Engineering with honours from the University of Bristol in 2018 before joining the Innovation Design Engineering double masters at Imperial College and the Royal College of Art. He is a recipient of a Design Studentship from the prestigious Royal Commission for the Exhibition 1851. His background in engineering and passion for design are constantly colliding, leading him to take an interdisciplinary approach to the complex and nuanced challenges we face. While working at Dyson he gained experience in design for manufacture, testing and analysis – skills which he now brings to his role as CTO at The Tyre Collective.
Heather Koldewey
Heather Koldewey started working for the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in 1995, as a postdoctoral research scientist, curator of London Zoo Aquarium, Head of Marine and Freshwater Conservation and now as Senior Technical Advisor. Heather is Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter. She was appointed a National Geographic Fellow in 2019 with a focus on solving ocean plastic pollution and was science co-lead for their 2019 Sea to Source: Ganges expedition. Heather co-founded Project Seahorse in 1996, the world’s leading authority on seahorses and early pioneer of community-based marine conservation; set up Net-Works, a multi-award winning project that has developed a novel community-based supply chain for discarded fishing nets that are recycled into carpet (recently spun out as social enterprise COAST-4C); and #OneLess, a systems change approach to building a more ocean-friendly society through working to make London the first capital city to stop using single-use plastic water bottles. She has been involved in science and conservation in the Chagos Archipelago since 2008, now running the Bertarelli Foundation’s Marine Science Programme, an interdisciplinary research and conservation programme for marine science and conservation in the Indian Ocean, involving over 80 researchers from 24 institutions and seven countries. Her reason for optimism is: ‘Wherever I have been in the world, there are amazing people of all ages, cultures and backgrounds who are doing incredible things to protect and restore the ocean and the incredible wildlife that lives there’.