Sustainability and Buildings

The key source of the College’s environmental impact is its building. The Buildings Committee has been renamed the Sustainability and Buildings Committee. Corpus is dedicated to reducing the energy use in its buildings and decarbonising by 2050 at the latest.

Completed Projects

The College is among the first Oxford Colleges to have removed all gas appliances in its kitchen, a key part of gas use reduction.

Similarly, the programme of upgrading old sash windows in Gentleman Commoners’ Quad was completed during summer 2022 with a view to improving the thermal efficiency of our heritage buildings. The same is the case with the recent refurbishment of the Porter’s Lodge.

Passivhaus Building

Corpus considers the environmental impacts of any new building projects. We went live with its project to build a new Special Collections Centre in 2021. To be named The Spencer Building. It will, we hope, be the first Passivhaus building to be linked to a sixteenth-century Grade I listed range of buildings, having passed a rigorous pressure test, a significant milestone on its journey to passivhaus certification. The architectectural firm Wright & Wright, is well known for the work they have done in both Oxford and Cambridge and most recently at Lambeth Palace. The project will be completed in mid-2024.

For more information about the building, look at the project’s website here.

Read the Bursar's article Green College, published in the July 2020 issue of the Sundial, here.

Read architects Clare Wright and Kirsty Shankland's article in the December 2020 issue of the Sundial, here.

Read architects Sandy Wright and Kirsty Shankland's article in the February 2023 issue of the Sundial, here.

"This is very much the beginning of our sustainability journey. What has been gratifying has been the shared sense of commitment and purpose across the College constituencies. The result has been a series of important and meaningful decisions which will reduce Corpus's impact on the environment in future years and permit us to achieve our charitable purpose in a much more sustainable manner."

Nick Melhuish, Bursar

Smart Heating System

Corpus is working with EcoSync, an Oxford-based clean tech start-up company, whose smart heating system for buildings facilitates room-by-room heating use monitoring, allowing heating to be turned off when there is no one in the room. We have rolled out their networked heating controls across the College in most areas where we have gas heating. We believe, based on the trial at Banbury Road, that this will reduce gas consumption by 20-30% by volume.

Peter Nitsche-Whitfield, the College's Sustainability Officer says: “EcoSync is allowing us to easily stop heating unoccupied rooms and set empty rooms to a freeze protection setting during vacations. We hope this will reduce our gas use and thus our carbon emissions, taking us closer to decarbonisation."

Read more about the installation of EcoSync's smart heating system here and here.

Future Projects

We are in the initial stages of developing a heat decarbonisation plan to identify where our energy performance is poor and to assess potential options for removing our gas boilers. This survey will inform our programme of works over the next decade with a view to ensuring that we can make rapid progress to decarbonising our operational sites.

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Sustainability and Buildings

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Completed Projects

Passivhaus Building