Our Green Team aim to keep our campus one of the greenest and most sustainable in the country and have a range of projects to achieve this, including the ISO 14001, ISO 5001 and Eco-campus Platinum environmental and energy management systems. Our efforts have helped place the University 9th in the 2019 People and Planet University Green League.

We’re also committed to meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which include social and ethical commitments beyond the environment alone. Here’s how we’re working towards some of the top objectives.

We climbed 309 places in the QS World University Rankings: Sustainability, from 640 overall in 2023, to 331 in 2024. Each university's environmental impact, social impact and governance was assessed and ranked separately, before being combined to give an overall rank.

As well as making the top 25% of universities overall globally, Aston University ranked 131 for equality, and at 172 for health and wellbeing, part of the social impact metric.

Sustainability Strategy 2020-2024

The development and articulation of Aston University's sustainability strategy gives us the opportunity to communicate clearly our ambition, our objectives, and our priorities; to state what is most important to us, and to identify our points of distinction.

Our Sustainability Strategy can be downloaded in full below:

Sustainable Travel

Aston University actively supports sustainable travel and was recently accredited for its sustainable travel plan by Modeshift stars to help the city of Birmingham's 2030 net-zero target and the aim to reduce the number of cars travelling into the city centre.

Are you an Aston member of staff? Learn about alternative ways you can travel to campus.

More information is available on our Sustainable Travel webpage

Sustainability Report

At Aston University, we take a holistic approach that embeds sustainability through all our external activities at local, national and international level in order to deliver real impact from our research.