Switch off for Earth Hour - Saturday 23 March

Thursday, 21 March 2013

The University is encouraging staff to support Earth Hour 2013. Organised by the WWF, Earth Hour is the largest symbolic mass event around the world, and involves simply turning off your lights for one hour at 8.30pm on Saturday 23 March.

Millions of people in 7,001 cities and towns across 151 countries now turn their lights off as part of Earth Hour in order to show their concern for the environment, and the University has signed up in support.

Tom Yearley, Energy Officer, said: "As most of us will not be on campus on Saturday evening, we have a unique opportunity to save even more energy by turning everything off on Friday evening. Since everything will not be turned on until Monday morning this will give us over 50 hours of shutdown! In fact, let's not stop at lights, but also make sure that computers are switched of at the wall and any electronic items which you are not using (such as phone and laptop chargers) are switched off.

"Last year we managed to reduce electricity consumption by 14% during Earth Hour, which meant a saving of £1,600 over the weekend. It is worth considering that if we did the same every weekend we would save a huge £88,000 a year in electricity!"

The University is committed to reducing its carbon emissions by 35% by the academic year 2015/2016, and switching off appliances over the weekend will help by reducing the University's electricity consumption.

Find out what else you can do to help reduce our carbon footprint >>>

Alternatively feel free to ask for advice, or send suggestions directly to the EEST Team:eest@reading.ac.uk, or follow them on Twitter for regular updates @UniRdg_EEST.

WWF encourage everyone taking part, whether at home or at work, to sign up to Earth Hour online (top right of the page), so they can track the volume of people who are involved.