Eco Church

Ashwood Church Eco Church Bronze and Silver Award

At Ashwood, we are committed to becoming more sustainable and environmentally friendly. We believe this reflects God’s love for his created world, and our desire to live in a positive relationship with the world he created. We believe that looking after our climate also shows love and responsibility to our global neighbours.

As part of this commitment we are part of the ECO CHURCH initiative, organised by A Rocha. Eco Church is a scheme for churches in England and Wales who want to demonstrate that the gospel is good news for God’s earth, and helps churches demonstrate that creation care in an internal part of loving our neighbours and following God faithfully. It looks at 5 areas of church life:

  • Worship and teaching
  • Management of church buildings
  • Management of church land
  • Community and global engagement
  • Lifestyle

And assesses how churches are implementing this at different levels.

In 2018 we were able to gain the BRONZE and in 2022 the SILVER Eco Church award as a recognition of our efforts in this area. We will continue to implement the things we have put in place for our Silver award and as we look at a new building we will work with the architects to ensure our new building is more sustainable, helping us to gain our Gold award.

If you would like to find out more about Eco Church please visit their website here

Commitment to reducing our carbon footprint

In our building project for a New Home for Ashwood we will seek to reduce our carbon footprint. The architect should include this in planning. We will partner with organisations and individuals who are interested in this part of the project.

  • Explore changing to a sustainable gas supplier when we renew
  • Increase vegetarian options at church run events – aim to move to half and half meat/veggie options
  • Use local/sustainable meat/ (and vegetables) options where possible
  • Create a purchasing check sheet for Team Leaders for all purchases to help them to think through making sustainable purchases
  • Continue a process of changing to eco cleaning solutions
  • Become affiliate of Cycling UK and encourage Ashwood members and people in community to cycle more
  • Hold a Climate Sunday annually, including encouraging walking to church
  • Work towards ‘paper free’ Ashwood News. First step in 2022: give people the option to ‘opt out’ of having a paper copy and choose to read online again
  • Review printing and paper use – how can we reduce this?
  • Work with NHFA team to complete a ‘travel survey’ to assess current travel habits, particularly on Sundays, to help us calculate our carbon footprint in future
  • Join in with local climate projects, for example ADC project tree planting in the local community. Encourage groups and members of the church to join in with this

​Recycle your printer inks

We are also collecting printer ink cartridges at the Ashwood Centre through the site Recycle4Charity.

Have a look at the list of accepted printer inks here.

In this section