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[Professor Suzanne Benn] "Sustainability is relevant to all aspects
of the business curriculum, and to many aspects of our research.
The way we feel about it here in this business school is you can't just consider the financial
returns alone . . . that inherent in that is consideration of other sorts of capital
such as social capital, trust, collaboration . . . intellectual capital or the human capital
of the workforce.
And of course that that all rests on the basis of the availability of resources which are
the natural resources, so the natural capital. The value of natural capital and availability
of resources.
So all those different forms of capital are emphasised to the students and incorporated
in one way or another into our research projects."
[Doctor Paul Brown] "Okay, so the energy efficiency project was
the integration of energy efficiency principles into a whole bunch of our subjects, both undergraduate
and postgraduate.
One of our assignments which we actually did with UTS Green which was a lot of fun, where
we actually had students, we gave them access to the university's energy systems to some
extent, like some building information and some energy experts, and we gave them some
problems which are faced by UTS and we said: 'Hey, go and try and find a way to solve this
from an accounting point of view.'
The base set of materials was schematics like building schematics and so the students were
looking at who needs what data to then control energy. There is actually so many things that
the students recommended that we actually had, we even had to organise a presentation
at one stage. I think we had about 6, 5 or 6 groups present their recommendations and
each group had maybe, I don't know 2,3,4 recommendations and they presented to senior UTS staff, and
that was a lot of fun for the students.
The energy efficiency project was actually a really nice context in which we could teach
students how to help organisations move incrementally towards sustainability."