PolyU’s Green PolyU Awards – Green Office programme is a unique campus-wide campaign to drive green workplace culture. Since its inception in 2016, this programme has advanced and developed in multiple directions. As a communicative platform that facilitates knowledge transfer and experience sharing, it offers departmental Green Officers and colleagues different training seminars, workshops, briefing sessions, and external visits around office sustainable practices. As a well-structured assessment scheme and award system for offices on campus, it provides clear guidelines and assessment criteria to help colleagues identify their impact on the environment. It also provides practical solutions that cost nothing or little to implement with a view to improve the offices’ environmental performance and resource efficiency measures.
Members of the University’s management, departmental Green Officers and colleagues gathered and saw the programme’s annual award ceremony on 4 June 2019. They received the acknowledgement and creditability they deserve for all the hard work they have put in to improve their offices’ sustainability practices. They also had the face-to-face interaction and exchanges over their achievements.
Among all, four offices were presented awards at the ceremony as a recognition of their efforts to green their workplaces and their outstanding abilities to achieve practical targets in 2018/19:
Bronze Award
General Education Centre
Silver Award
Human Resources Office
Silver Award
Industrial Centre
Gold Award
Campus Development Office
The ceremony presented great networking opportunities when colleagues mingled in a pool of like-minded peers. Ms. Karen Ho, Head of Corporate and Community Sustainability, WWF-Hong Kong, came and brought to the audience an inspiring and motivating speech. She highlighted that greening an office required both top-down and bottom-up actions and the determination to start with behavioral change even with small deeds.
Representatives from the awarded offices also shared their good examples and their work in proactively advocating behavioral change and managing the environmental impacts of their offices.
Having consistently grown year on year, the Green PolyU Awards – Green Office programme has become the University’s leading initiative for rewarding and celebrating offices for their contribution to resource efficiency and reducing negative environmental impacts. More engaging and motivating activities will come soon to support colleagues to accelerate their progress in greening their offices.
