Four vehicles were funded by a successful bid for Circular Economy funding from Welsh Government made by the University’s Campus Services, who own most of the University’s Fleet A further six electric vehicles were purchased with funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales.
Changing the fleet over to electric contributes to the University’s ambitions to be a sustainable University and to contribute further to the goals and objectives of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015.
Meryl Wyn-Jones, Head of Facilities Operations, Campus Services explains:
“The funding enabled us to replace diesel vehicles with electric ones; the Security section now, in the main, only uses electric vehicles. The Facilities section has now disposed of its two remaining owned diesel vehicles and the section also now uses electric vehicles, with the exception of a hired diesel tail-lift van used when the need arises to move larger or heavier loads.
“Overall, there are currently 16 electric vehicles within our fleet and we’d like to move further down the electric route in future.”
Meryl explained that within the electric fleet there are two specialist electric vehicles – a tipper truck and cage van.
"The Grounds and Landscape team have reported improved efficiency since using the electric tipper truck. The truck’s higher capacity is resulting in fewer journeys to and from the compost site and its tipper facility has reduced the time spent unloading. The electric cage vehicle used by the Facilities team is also proving to be really useful, especially as it has a ramp facility to more easily load bins and recycling."
