Top business award for city council

'Green' initiatives praised at local awards

Carlisle City Council is the first council in the county to scoop a business award for their environmental practices.

At a Cumbria Business Environment Network (CBEN) awards ceremony held at Shap Wells Hotel last week (Tuesday, 30 October), the City Council was announced as the winner of the event's top prize a Silver Environmental Excellence Award.

Tony Dean, North West Regional Director of the Environment Agency praised the City Council's 'phenomenal progress' in implementing environmental improvements in the past 18 months. The commitment to environmental improvement including the use of sustainability energy all contributed to the City Council's success. Leader of Carlisle City Council, Cllr Mike Mitchelson said:

We are committed to making Carlisle cleaner, greener and safer. We want to take the lead and encourage other organisations and businesses to follow our example. The CBEN awards recognise the efforts we have taken to improve our environmental performance.

A recent range of environmental measures introduced by the City Council include:

• a review of their vehicle fleet with the Energy Saving Trust, to receive advice about reducing mileage, fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions;
• following green design schemes incorporating sustainable materials, environmentally friendly practices and energy-saving measures as part of its new build, refurbishment and maintenance of Council amenities. This includes installing solar thermal water heating systems (sun heats water for washing etc) in hostels and other council maintained buildings;
• reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the Bousteads Grassing depot buildings by 10% through better energy management
• fitting power saving devices to appliances and stand alone printers and encouraging staff to switch equipment off when not in use;
• introducing a target to reduce our paper consumption by 10%;
• replacing bottle water coolers with plumbed in water coolers on four sites to reduce the environmental impact associated with production and distribution of bottled water;
• improving office recycling facilities for staff and phasing out the use of disposable plastic cups by office based staff.

Carlisle City Council's operational base also received a gold seal of approval at the CBEN awards, for the fifth year running, for its environmental practices.

The City Council, as an overall authority, also received a Silver award for its environmental practices, a step up from last year's Bronze award. CBEN auditor, David Foster, randomly selected four City Council sites to visit and see what improvements have been made. Tullie House, Talkin Tarn, Bereavement Services and the Carlisle Enterprise Centre were all assessed:

• At Talkin Tarn great steps have been taken to incorporate green building design and use environmentally friendly technologies, but it is also the smaller, less obvious things that matter. As well as recycling more materials at Talkin Tarn, in an effort to reduce the amount of packaging waste being created, the tearoom is now selling scooped ice cream rather than packaged lollies. This has also had the benefit of reducing the amount of litter near the tea room and making it a more pleasant place to visit.
• Because Tullie House is open 7 days a week, nearly every day of the year, keeping the energy consumption down of this large, complex building isn't exactly easy. Again it's the simple things that matter. Switching off equipment at night like computers, photocopiers and of course lights is a simple thing to do and something that the staff at Tullie House are well used to doing, particularly the security staff who are left to close the building at night.
• The City Council's Bereavements Services have been at the forefront of environmentally friendly thinking for a long time, but CBEN were impressed with efforts to comply fully with environmental legislation. Crematoriums are now been forced to tackle the problem of reducing mercury emissions being released from cremations. The problem has arisen because so many of us now have mercury fillings in our teeth. Crematoriums now have to install special equipment to capture at least 50% of their mercury emissions, but Carlisle City Council is going one step further and capturing 100%.
• The Carlisle Enterprise Centre is home to many small businesses. Over the past year tenants have been encouraged to do their bit with the introduction of paper and cardboard recycling bins. Keeping overhead costs down is of course very important to businesses. To help do this, tenants were offered the use of a 'plug in' electricity meter that monitors how much electricity individual appliances use. This allows tenants to target areas for improvement in terms of energy efficiency.

The Cumbria Business Environment Network (CBEN) awards highlight good practice and commend local businesses that use environmentally friendly work practices. The City Council's Bousteads Grassing site was championed for continuing to introduce new 'green' schemes.

The awards are based on internationally-recognised standards and each business undergoes a 'surveillance' visit that assesses how they are continually striving to improve.