St Michael and All Angels, Headingley – Silver Eco-Church Award

St Michael and All Angels church in Headingley was absolutely thrilled to have achieved the Silver Eco-Church Award in March 2017, and in September 2017 we were officially presented with the award by the Diocesan Environment Officer, Jemima Parker. St Michael’s has long had an environmental conscience and when we became aware of the Eco-Church (formerly Eco-Congregation) scheme we quickly signed-up and got busy working towards our first award.

The St Michael’s Green Group was founded in March 2014 composed of over a dozen keen church attendees wanting to make a positive environmental difference to St Michael’s and the wider community. Without a strong group of willing individuals our achievement would not have been possible. It was important for us to have a ‘green’ mission statement which became:

“The Green Group will work to increase environmental awareness and have a positive impact on all operations at St Michael’s and in the wider world through promoting sustainability and improving biodiversity in our green spaces.”

With this in mind, we were ready to work through the Eco-Church resources and become more sustainable. We first came up with a Sustainability Action Plan (SAP) to audit current good environmental practise and where improvement could be made. This provided us with a clear action plan of tasks to get stuck into!

Working towards the Eco-Church award was made easier by the fact that they don’t expect you to have lots of money or space in order to have your efforts recognised.

We focussed on the small things we could change to make a difference. We bought more mugs so that fewer disposable cups were needed for coffee, but recognising that disposables are sometimes necessary, we stopped buying polystyrene cups and only buy cardboard now. The next step for this is to source recyclable or compostable cups. This example emphasises that there is always more you can do, but all in good time.

We are blessed to have a churchyard full of trees, shrubs and grass and we feed the birds regularly. We also have a number of bird boxes installed and will be putting up bat boxes in 2018. We had a great day building a ‘bug hotel’, but sadly this was stolen. We won’t be beaten though and are planning the bug hotel mark 2!

We take part in various campaigns including the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch and Christian Aid Speak-Up and have had trips to local recycling and refuse facilities. We have twinned our toilets, and a partnership has also been formed with our local TCV branch after we raised money for a project of theirs and got a group together to plant 300 trees for them, which was great fun! Our pew sheet has reduced to one sheet of A4

and we have committed to only serving Fairtrade tea, coffee and hot chocolate. We now provide recycling facilities in church and have installed ‘Please Switch Off’ signs above light switches in our Parish Hall. We undertook an investigation into the pros and cons of electronic hand driers versus paper towels and concluded that energy efficient driers were far better, so we replaced towels for driers in the Hall.

These are just some of the things we have done to achieve the award, but we’re not stopping there! We have plans to switch to a renewable energy provider and will be assessing our carbon footprint. We are investigating the provision of a Parish allotment and will continue supporting local, national and international environmental and humanitarian charities.

Luke Verrall – Convenor, St Michael’s Green Group