Three projects succeed at the Vice-Chancellor's Colloquium

Exeter: RePlateOx 

At Oxford, the juxtaposition between excess and need is impossible to ignore. Inside college halls, formal dinners lit by candlelight are a daily occurrence, yet just outside, people are regularly seen begging for food. For many students, this contradiction is deeply personal. We have witnessed it ourselves firsthand: while volunteering with Turl Street Homeless Action, handing out meals with NishkamSWAT, or simply walking home from hall after seeing plates of food go untouched. 

Meanwhile, Oxford colleges spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on food each year, much of which ends up as waste. Meals are routinely overproduced as attendance is unpredictable, and colleges are often left with large amounts of untouched food. This issue is not unique to Oxford: in the UK alone, 9.5 million tonnes of food are wasted annually, with less than 1% of that rescued for human consumption. Globally, food waste is responsible for 58% of methane emissions from landfill. Locally, Foodprinting Oxford found that reducing food waste was the single most effective way to lower the city’s environmental footprint. And yet, little has changed. 

That is why we created RePlateOx. 

Our initiative aims to establish a system through which Oxford colleges can safely redistribute leftover food. Core idea is to have a chariot bike and student volunteers to distribute leftover warm food around the city for people struggling with food insecurity, specifically homeless people. Rather than letting meals go to waste, we want to build infrastructure, working with charities, bike couriers, and food safety advisors, to redirect surplus food to those who need it most. By reducing food waste and the reliance on individually packaged supermarket meals, we can tackle both environmental harm and food insecurity at once. 

A key part of ReplateOx is the introduction of a new student liaison role across colleges to manage food redistribution efforts. This would embed sustainability into the structure of college life, making food-sharing a practical norm rather than a sporadic volunteering effort. 

Our team ties together strengths from a range of backgrounds, bringing together earth sciences, historical research, and ethical inquiry. This allows us to quantify the environmental impact of food waste, understand the social roots and recent escalation of food insecurity in Oxford, and critically examine the moral contradictions in a city where excess and deprivation coexist. This interdisciplinary approach ensures our solution is not only practical and data-driven but also socially informed and ethically grounded. 

We have conducted over twenty interviews with individuals affected by Oxford’s food system including people experiencing homelessness, college catering staff managing surplus, and charity workers navigating complex food safety regulations. Our proposal is grounded in lived realities and practical challenges, not just idealism. 

RePlateOx seeks to transform Oxford’s food culture towards accountability, sustainability, and compassion. By making colleges more accountable and aligning student life with sustainability, we aim to create a model of responsible consumption. We believe Oxford, with its unique collegiate structure and global influence, has the opportunity to demonstrate how surplus food can serve people, not end up in landfill. 

Somerville: OxGreen 

Drawing on interdisciplinary research, OxGreen is a student-designed mobile app that seeks to overcome what we identified as the central barrier to young-people’s sustainable behaviour: the Intention-Action Gap. We view key elements of this as: building sustainable habits, streamlining eco-friendly decisions, and offering social and psychological incentives that promote long-term change.

Our personal connection to the project stems from our shared frustration as students who care deeply about climate change but often struggle to translate that concern into consistent action. Whether it was forgetting to bring a reusable cup, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices in living sustainably, or encountering institutional inertia when trying to push for change in our colleges, we’ve all experienced the gap between intention and practice firsthand. These everyday moments of dissonance inspired us to design a tool that would not only help us act more sustainably; but also empower others to do the same. We believe that meaningful change starts with individuals who feel capable, informed, and supported - and that small, routine actions, when amplified across a community, can shift cultures. Our values of accessibility, collaboration, and optimism guided every stage of OxGreen’s development. We are excited by the potential of technology not to replace climate consciousness, but to quietly embed it into how we live, study, and support each other at Oxford.  

The app draws on research by Sheeran and Webb (2016) which found that up to 50% of pro-environmental intentions fail to result in action. Building upon research by Nghiem and Carrasco (2016), Wemyss et al. (2023), and Douglas and Bauer (2021), the app combines habit formation with gamification. Activities are embedded into daily life through checklists and streaks, while challenges, leaderboards, and reward badges lower the perceived effort of sustainable action. Future features include quizzes, forums, and community pages to deepen engagement and reduce decision fatigue through shared advice and knowledge. 

The app’s model is supported by successful precedents. Nottingham Trent’s ‘Green Rewards’ app achieved significant behavioural change, while a Polish study by Balińska et al. showed an average of 8% emissions reduction among student users. With this evidence in mind, OxGreen aims to replicate and build upon these successes at Oxford. 

The project is interdisciplinary in its execution and ethos. Drawing from both humanities and STEM perspectives, our team combined behavioural insight with technical development to create a holistic solution. Our own surveys validated the significance of the intention-action gap and indicated strong student openness to engaging with the proposed platform. Support has already been secured from student organisations, computing societies, and sustainability groups ensuring low development costs and broad stakeholder buy-in. 

By embedding climate action into the daily routines of Oxford students and creating an ecosystem of motivation and mutual accountability, OxGreen addresses systemic, financial, social, and psychological obstacles to meaningful change. It is a scalable, inclusive, and dynamic solution that empowers individuals to act - and keep acting - for the planet, backed by science. 

Wycliffe Hall: The Oxford Swap & Shop 

Introduction 

The Oxford Swap & Shop would provide a ‘marketplace’ from which students can acquire second-hand home goods, clothing, and university essentials, at a much lower cost - both financially and, crucially, environmentally.  

• As a centralised event, the resources of all colleges would be united and made accessible to all students.  
• As a large-scale event, with corresponding advertising, both returning and incoming students would be incentivised to satisfy their shopping needs here rather than with mass producers.  
• As an event for donation, not just acquisition, it will encourage students to reuse and recycle, as well as reduce.  

For freshers, there would be a nominal entry fee. Returning students would be required to donate, receiving a token per donation, which they can exchange for a new item from the marketplace.  

Motivation 

The problem persists on two levels. 

On a general scale, the environmental impact of fast fashion and overconsumption is colossal. With clothing, the fault lies in each stage. In production, the textile industry uses 98 million tonnes of non-renewable resources per annum.  In the consumption stage the United Kingdom is particularly culpable; as an estimate, more than two tonnes of clothing are purchased each minute, more than any other country in Europe.  Equally troubling is our rate of disposal - on aggregate, we bin 235 million items of clothing each spring  – which constitutes an enormous volume of landfill. The obvious way to opt out of these vicious stages is to donate to, and shop at, charity shops. However, with students complaining about the inflated charity shop prices,  the Swap & Shop provides a more affordable and specialised option, without having to sacrifice sustainability.  

On a specific scale, many students purchase an array of items needed for joining university, only to either dispose of them upon leaving, or let them collect dust. This cycle is a microcosm of our society’s hyperconsumerism, and is significantly detrimental to the environment – especially given that the ‘cheap’ home goods students tend toward are predominantly plastic. By incentivising students to donate, and thus ‘recycle’, such goods, the Swap & Shop allows them to be reused, and the need to purchase from mass producers is reduced.  

Solution 

By harnessing both the size and specific needs of our community, the Swap & Shop could help implement a transition from a linear economy of goods in Oxford. By keeping materials in a local closed-loop system, it promotes a circular economy; by encouraging collaboration, it fosters a shared economy. Moreover, in its rejection of the philosophy of consumerism, the Swap & Shop would remind individuals that they are morally responsible for their choices in both acquiring and disposing of goods, and enable us to capitalise on the power of collective action.  

With the Swap & Shop, everybody wins: the individual student in terms of cost and convenience; and the community in terms of increased collaboration and unity. Most importantly however, the environment wins, with the decided shift away from mass consumption and towards sustainable shopping.