We have committed to the A Rocha Eco Church Award Scheme. The scheme enables us to continuously assess our current efforts and activities across all aspects of church life: our worship and teaching, management of our church building and land, our community and global engagement and our personal lifestyles. The scheme also gives us clear direction on how to improve the ways that we care for God’s earth and reduce the environmental impact of our collective behaviours.

Currently we are in the process of improving the lighting in church, we have replaced all fixtures in the church rooms with LED lights that use 90% less energy. And this summer we are replacing the main church lighting. This provides several immediate improvements: it cuts our energy usage so reducing our fuel costs, it removes the need for older types of bulbs that contain harmful chemicals , and it saves money and resources because the new LED bulbs have a much longer lifespan than older style bulbs. We are also investigating the installation of solar panels on the church roof to start generating our own energy and reducing our carbon footprint further.

With so many people visiting the church over the course of a week, we provide a lot of refreshments from the kitchen and we do a lot of cleaning. So we make sure that we stock fairtrade products wherever possible – especially our tea and coffee. We also buy environmentally friendly cleaning products so they contain no harsh environment-damaging chemicals. And we use washable cleaning cloths and mops to reduce the amount of non-recyclable products we throw away. We can do better – and the next step is to ensure that our consumables fulfil all the LOAF requirement: local, organically grown, animal friendly and fairly traded.

Since 2020, the church’s food waste has been separately collected so that if we do have any leftover food products that cannot be used – such as coffee grounds and teabags, these are sent to an anaerobic digestion plant to be turned into green biogas energy. This reduces the amount of compostable rubbish going to landfill.

We look to bulk buy and avoid single-use plastics as much as possible but where we cannot, we continue to improve the ways that we recycle. We ensure that we separate our waste as fully as possible and now that local supermarkets provide soft plastics recycling, we separate out bread and fruit bags, crisp packets and biscuits wrappers and take them for recycling so they don’t contribute to landfill.

We encourage everyone in the congregation to be environmentally mindful of their own lifestyle choices. There are so many ways that we can all contribute to saving our planet, from where we spend our money, to how and where we travel, to choices we make around personal consumption and how we lobby our government and wider organisations to improve the environmental impact of our legislation and regulations. A good place to start is by signing up to the creationcare.org.uk website where you can review your own household focus on caring for God’s world and find lots of great information on how to be more environmentally aware and proactive.