Successful transfer from teaching to business: Eco-Good Award to be presented on 14 April

On 14 April 2021, the Eco-Good-Award will be presented for the fourth time at the Faculty of Sustainable Business at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE). Students were invited to submit their projects that provide impetus for social change in terms of environmental awareness. To this end, 17 current transfer projects on various sustainability topics were submitted, including, for the first time, a project that focussed on GLG Gesellschaft für Leben und Gesundheit mbH.

How sustainable is your own company and what opportunities do regional organisations have to improve their environmental management? These are the questions that the students deal with in the "Corporate Environmental Management" module at HNEE. They also look at specific examples from practice. This winter semester, students are working with GLG Gesellschaft für Leben und Gesundheit mbH for the first time on an ecomapping project. "The aim was to create ecomaps for various sub-areas, i.e. rooms in the outdoor area of the Werner Forßmann Hospital in Eberswalde. The purpose of the ecomapping was to analyse the campus in terms of emissions, microclimate and traffic in order to develop options for improvement in the future," says Irene Köppe, Deputy Head of Corporate Development at GLG. Since autumn, she has been working with a group of students to collect and evaluate sufficient data about their own campus. The result was, for example, a survey on car park usage among employees at the site. Many suggestions for improving the situation on site were derived from this. "For example, the students recommended that the car park lighting could be made more sustainable and that the outdoor seating could be made more attractive. The idea of greening the exterior walls to reduce noise and optimise air quality is also very interesting," says Irene Köppe. As a next step, the GLG is now examining how this and other proposals can be implemented in the medium term. Something similar is happening in the HNEE budget department. Students had exchanged ideas with employees on the topic of sustainable procurement. "The group has developed a form that takes greater account not only of ecological aspects but also social justice in future procurement procedures," reports Dirk Range, a member of staff in the Procurement/Third Party Funding department. The students were guided by the core labour standards of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and used them to develop a query that makes it easier to understand the value and supply chains of production processes. "If these aspects are taken into account by even more public clients in the future, we can work together to appeal to the ecological and socially responsible conscience of globally active companies and corporations and thus ensure a sustainable improvement in production processes," says Dirk Range confidently.
Both project groups have been nominated for HNEE's annual Eco-Good Award with their proposals. This makes them two of a total of five groups that have prevailed over 16 other projects in an initial pre-selection by the jury, which includes permanent members Prof Dr Thoralf Buller (initiator), Prof Dr Alexander Conrad and Prof Dr Armin Thoma as well as one or two guest jurors from science and/or practice. Other groups, on the other hand, focussed on the canteens run by the Studentenwerk Frankfurt (Oder) on the Forest- and Citycampus and other internal procurement issues at the university. "This year's participation was particularly high and thematically very diverse. This also shows how extensive and important the topic of environmental management is in regional companies. The exchange is also a unique example of the transfer between teaching and practice at HNEE," says Prof Dr Thoralf Buller, lecturer and module leader at the Faculty of Sustainable Business.

SAVE THE DATE
On 14 April 2021, from 11:00 to 11:45 a.m., the Eco-Good Award will be presented at the Faculty of Sustainable Business at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE). This year, the award will be presented by Benjamin Raschke, co-chair of the Alliance 90/The Greens parliamentary group in the Brandenburg state parliament. The setting for the event has not yet been finalised. Depending on the applicable corona regulations, there will be another update on this at a later date.

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