Being 100% recyclable is crucial in any eco village because it aligns with the overarching goal of sustainability. It reduces waste, conserves resources, preserves the environment, and fosters a culture of responsible consumption and recycling within the community. It’s an essential aspect of creating a harmonious and sustainable living environment and is something we really love working on at the Elmsbrook Eco Village development. We’re happy to say we took what we learned and ran with it on our other sites in the south too! This means we can officially say that in the South East, Smarter Services are 100% recyclable/compostable!
Our Journey to Being 100% Recyclable
It all starts with the plot of land we obtained, where we’ve created our very own composting base. So, our grass, leaves, or hedge cuttings will all be separated and composted down over a period of time. We also have a polytunnel where we are growing our own plants from the cuttings that are taken from sites. When the plants in the polytunnels are ready then we’ll move them on to our raised beds and then eventually when they mature, we will transfer them back to the developments. It becomes a circular system that is completely sustainable for not just sites like the Elmsbrook Eco Village, but for all our sites going forward. We’re now taking what we’ve created in Oxford and Bicester and bringing those practices to all of our South East sites. So, while it’s a new development in our businesses, we’re ready to shout about being 100% completely recyclable in our southern sites right now!
Keeping it Local = Keeping it Sustainable
From the 260 or so sites that we have in the South East, anything that we’ve grown within the general maintenance of the developments, we bring back. For example, if we’re pruning roses, we take those cuttings and plant them back on the site, ensuring new plants are purely from the sites that we’re working on at the time. We’re not travelling to collect anything, nothing’s been delivered to us. There’s just the waste that we accumulate on a day-to-day basis, which goes to our composting base and into the composter.
We’re also trying to step into the edible side of things. The fruit and veg that we consume on a daily basis, if they have seeds that we can use, these are then regrown to the point we can replant them. So, giving back is becoming a really big aspect of what we do. It is fairly new; our polytunnel currently houses about 60 small plants at the moment. We hope to be able to replant what we have grown from what would normally go to landfill. We are trying our best to give back to the environment; after all, small steps lead to big changes!
The Future of Food Waste
Currently, we haven’t got the capability to process the food waste from the sites that we look after. We’re a long way from that at the moment, so for now it’s very much trial and error on what we can achieve. We’re starting from the ground up and learning as we go. So, for now, anything that we consume within our household as a team, we try and compost. It’s very much still in the development phase, so we’re going to see how it works and constantly reevaluate. How can we improve this? Do we need to upscale? At the moment it’s purely waste that you would generally throw away, therefore ending up in landfill, from our sites and our own households. So we’re starting small, but with the intention to upscale as soon as we can!
It’s an exciting process, to see not only how we can be 100% recyclable as a team on our sites, but also encouraging residents to recycle more themselves too. If we all make a little more effort, those changes add up so quickly and the planet will thank us!
Supporting Sustainable Habits
Residents really like the ideas we’ve been working on, particularly in the Elmsbrook development; they’ve been so supportive! Do these ideas contribute to our sustainability initiatives? Yes. But more importantly the residents feel that we’ll deal with the situation. There’s that trust there and that’s lovely to see. It really encourages us to keep going; to keep looking for better sustainable solutions. We’re actively trying to improve every day and reduce the carbon footprint of our sites, and actively looking for new ways and better ways to recycle. The residents are a huge part of that process and so must absolutely have a say, and are more than happy with what we do.
We want to give a big shout-out to our hard-working grounds maintenance and staff within the Elmsbrook development and all our grounds teams in the South; we really couldn’t do it without the collaborative effort of the whole Smarter Services team!
