Ingredients (mix freely):
• Vegetarian curries, plentiful (Belgrave Road for preference)
• Charity-shop wardrobe, vintage rails
• Refillable water bottle, reusable coffee cup
• Rescued food: Too Good To Go, uni common fridge
• Home sustainability habits, adapted locally
• Career events, student societies, community interactions
• Willingness to admit mistakes
Method:
1. Eat where the locals eat. Belgrave Road smells of cardamom and diesel in unequal measure. I drifted into a mostly-vegetarian semester – roughly a third less food CO₂ than a UK meat-eater’s diet (Oxford study, 55,000 adults), 275 kg saved. SDG 12.
2. Dress in stories. Every Saturday, Queens Road or one of Leicester’s vintage rails. Six charity shops, one afternoon, £34. Items diverted: seventeen. Each secondhand piece displacing a new one saves ~12 kg CO₂e – 210 kg in a semester. Britain’s second-hand scene is the actual answer to fast fashion.
3. Refill, reuse, rescue. Leicester tap water is fine; Refill maps thousands of free stations. A reusable coffee cup earns 25p off at most chains and dents Britain’s throwaway culture. Too Good To Go saves 2.7 kg CO₂e per bag (Oxford/WRAP-reviewed); the uni’s common fridge was campus’s most underused rescue point.
4. Move at human pace. Campus living put gym, groceries, town and station within walking distance; the local bus stayed a rare guest. Between cities: National Express and FlixBus at a fifth of a car’s emissions per passenger, Lime e-bikes across Birmingham and London. When a car was unavoidable, we shared the Uber four ways.
5. Invest in yourself, sustainably. The most durable ingredient wasn’t food or clothing. UoL’s career service, student societies, a consultancy challenge that threw internationals at a real client’s problem – evenings that stretched my English past its comfort zone. SDG 4. A semester abroad is only truly sustainable if you take something enduring from it: intercultural instinct, a professional network, analytical stamina for thousands of small decisions ahead.
Substitutions for next time:
Flights. Outbound, return, a weekend in Dublin. myclimate puts the four legs at ~0.7 tonnes CO₂e – more than a whole year’s “sustainable” budget of 0.6 tonnes. Greenpeace (2023) found 61% of European cross-border routes cheaper by plane than train: SDG 13 collides with SDG 10. Systemic, not only personal.
No bike. I walked campus without complaint but never explored Leicestershire beyond it. £45 of second-hand hybrid would have opened the whole county. Habit inertia is a recipe-killer.
To serve:
Carbon: ~0.55 tonnes avoided through food, clothing, refill and rescue – cancelled by ~0.7 tonnes of flying. Net: slightly in the red, honestly counted. Small habits felt virtuous; big-ticket decisions dwarfed them. Yet the most sustainable thing a student carries home is intercultural stamina – it shapes thousands of decisions for decades.
Longer horizon – better recipe!
Recommended pairings (sources/apps used):
1. myclimate flight calculator – https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new
2. Our World in Data, travel footprints – https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
3. SDG Tracker – https://sdg-tracker.org
4. Too Good To Go – https://www.toogoodtogo.com/en-gb
5. Refill – https://www.refill.org.uk
