Sustainable living project

In January 2005 we completed a housing scheme in South Molton in North Devon named Oak Meadow. The houses and flats on this estate were designed and built to a high environment and ‘healthy living’ standards. Before the residents moved into the homes we met with them regularly and together staff and residents discussed how we could encourage and support resident householders to adopt an environmental lifestyle at home; things like energy and water conservation, reducing car use, growing vegetables, recycling and reducing waste sent to landfill. This experience highlighted for us that it wasn’t just the residents that needed to change their behaviour to become ‘green’ it was the organisation too!

Inspired by Oak Meadow we successfully applied to Defra to the Environmental Action Fund for a three year grant to develop the Sustainable Living Project whose aim is to develop a partnership approach to promoting and monitoring sustainable consumption and production of waste within the social housing sector. This initiative has just completed its third year and backed by a strong partnership of community partners we have been looking at two themes:

• how we can manage our housing stock more sustainabily and offer environmentally responsible housing services
• if as a social landlord we can inspire and enable residents to adopt a sustainable lifestyle in their own home.

For more information please download the final project summary report and visit the residents’ environmental green group (REGG) web site www.regg.org which features many of the projects’ initiatives in the case studies sections. To find out about the other EAF project please visit http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/eaf/index.htm#funding