New water and local free range eggs
Thursday, 28 February 2019
The University is continuing to lead the way in delivering environmentally sustainable solutions on campus. The Sustain It scheme has now served 141,785 drinks with refillable cups amounting to 50.2% of all drinks served on campus. The remainder have been served in paper cups which we send for recycling using CupCycling, an innovative British business. The Freestyle machines significantly reduce the number of deliveries, the number of plastic bottles and waste packaging as we buy a concentrate rather than finished drinks.
Secondly, Life Water Cans, filled with UK sourced spring water, are being phased in to replace single use plastic water bottles in our catering outlets across our campuses, with cans containing 70% recycled aluminium. This will help remove tens of thousands of single use plastic water bottles where customers require a single-use option and is fully recyclable within the UK. Our preference remains that customers make use of our re-usable bottles and cups.
Lastly, the eggs used at Eat at the Square, Wantage Hall, Park Eat, the Dairy and St. Patrick’s Hall are going to be supplied from Beechwood Farm in Berkshire. This builds local sourcing into the established use of free-range eggs at the University, which has been the case for the last ten years. We caught up with Nathan Rice of Beechwood Farms:
“My wife and I studied Agriculture at Reading University – they were the days when we were in the old white Early Gate Buildings and had the best three years that you could imagine. We left in 1997 and got married in 2006. With my parents, we run Beechwood Eggs – a free-range egg farm near Newbury.
“We are a family business producing, grading and distributing free range eggs from our twenty-six thousand free-range hens. The flocks are small and the hens are able to roam from dawn to dusk in pasture and natural woodland.
“We are passionate about producing and supplying fresh and delicious tasting eggs. We are very proud to be supplying the University of Reading as this is where it all began!”